Why a digital media expert loves newsletters

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Why a digital media expert loves newsletters

They have an authenticity that generates public trust and engagement; it's old-fashioned personal communication

James Breiner

Jan 30

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You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.

Ismael Nafría: “The newsletter is a very effective, very natural, very authentic format.”

Trust is in short supply these days, which makes trustworthy information sources and people even more valuable. I recently did a series on trustworthy news media and why they are so important in our democratic societies.

Email newsletters have become an effective tool for generating trust in media. Which is why I wanted to interview my friend Ismael Nafría, author of seven books on digital media and an expert on email newsletters.

He publishes his own email newsletter in Spanish, Tendenci@s, which I follow closely.

I’ve known Ismael for more than a decade. We are both members of the executive board of a non-profit, SembraMedia.org, that supports independent media in Latin America and around the world. In addition to his native Spanish, he’s fluent in English and Catalan, the language of his hometown, Barcelona.

What follows are excerpts from our 40-minute conversation, which was conducted in Spanish. I translated it with the help of Deepl.ai and Google Translate. (The video below is in Spanish, with English subtitles.)

A summary of what we talked about:

The authentic, personal connection of email newsletters
The growth of his own newsletter, Tendenci@s
The risks he took by going independent two years ago
The digital media metrics that matter the most

The boldface emphasis in Ismael’s replies is mine.

Newsletters have authenticity

James Breiner: There are many distribution and information channels, many information production platforms. How is the newsletter different from your point of view, in terms of audiences, connections, what are the advantages, more or less?

Ismael Nafría: The newsletter is a format, a way of communicating that I am in love with. It seems to me to be a very effective, very natural, very authentic format, which facilitates something that is the opposite of other digital platforms today.

It allows a very direct contact between the person or people who write the newsletter with their audience. It is a format that, in order for it to work, the objective has to be very clear, the subject it deals with and the target audience have to be very clear.

But that is precisely what makes it interesting, because the people who receive the newsletter are interested in that specific topic. If not, they do not sign up, or if they sign up and then see that it was not what they expected, they delete it and that's it.

So it is very authentic in the sense that the topic is very well chosen, the audience is very specific. The voice or the tone of the person who writes it is his own, that is, the best thing in a newsletter is to be as you are, you yourself are natural and tell things as you would tell them to a friend you were talking to.

The people who are signed up can read it when it suits them, as many times as they want. They can answer me, they can make a comment, they can share it with someone. It has a beginning and an end.

His newsletter has 9,000 free subscribers

James: In the seven years of publishing Tendenci@s, there have been many changes in the digital ecosystem and I wonder how they have affected what you do.

Ismael: Well look, there have been changes, but in the product itself there have not been so many changes. When I launched it in May 2017, I had just published the book about The New York Times, and my goal in launching the newsletter was to reach media professionals and really anyone in the world of communication interested in the development of Spanish-speaking digital media.

Ismael Nafrías book delved into how the *Times* transformed itself to thrive on digital platforms as well as in print.

It was a newsletter in Spanish that was reaching people in Spain and throughout Latin America, as well as Spanish speakers in, for example, the United States, Brazil, and Portugal.

And from then until today, which is now seven and a half years, the audience has never stopped growing, every week there are new people.

Right now I have 9,000 people signed up for the free edition every two weeks. And in September 2023, I launched a paid edition, which I publish practically every day, from Monday to Friday, shorter, with the two or three of the most interesting topics of the day and a series of additional links that have caught my attention.

And then I publish a paid version, also every two weeks, which is called Tendenci@s plus, which only paid subscribers receive. And there I always deal with six or seven topics more oriented to professionals.

James: I am among those free subscribers, and I must thank you for the amount of information about digital media in all parts of the world. I keep up to date in terms of what is happening in the industry because you follow media in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, etc. . . . .

Ismael: I thank you very much that for so many years you are following my work. In the end, my real objective with this newsletter is to help the sector to follow the rhythms set by innovation and changes in business models.

I have now tried to turn Tendenci@s into the center of my professional activity. I do consulting, I give classes, I give talks, I write books, but I think that Tendenci@s is for me right now like the heart of my activity,

Everything I write is also my brand, and it serves me and feeds all my other activities. It helps me to be constantly reflecting, and to think whether this trend, this thing that's happening, is it really going to last in time, is it really something that the media has to get to work on immediately, or should we calm down a bit and see where we have to go.

The clearest case for me is the need, in many cases, to count on subscriptions or income from users, as part of the new economic ecosystem that the media must have.

That helped me a lot to write the book about the New York Times and to understand why they did it [paid digital subscriptions]. But, well, this constant work of reflecting, reading, talking to a lot of people, interviewing, helps me a lot for that.

What I have started to do is to collaborate with other professionals in the sector to support each other. For example, there are topics that I don't follow so closely, and I have established an agreement with some media or with someone who does cover those topics well and we exchange content.

A recent example is the 8-part series on Tendenci@s of Clara Soteras’s SEO Instruction Manual for Digital Media (in Spanish) — JB

A valuable audience

Right now I have three in progress, and what I also have is an agreement with the consulting firm FT Strategies to offer in Spanish in each issue a content of their insights. And then I have a Knowledge Partner agreement with McKinsey to promote their content, especially in Spanish, or any interesting content they offer.

James: What do these sponsors or advertisers tell you about the value of your newsletter to them?

Ismael: For them it is clearly a very natural way to enter a market and an audience they are interested in.

In other words, what I really want is to be able to reach the public that is really interested in reading the things I offer in the newsletter. For the advertisers, that is the public they are also looking for, so everything fits very well.

Focus on better metrics

James: So, quality of audience rather than quantity. Engagement rather than scale.

Ismael: I think this would be one of the most interesting things that could happen to our industry is that we stop talking about total users and talk about much more real things like daily users or registered users or subscribed users or paid users or those who actually interact with the publication.

In other words, much more quality metrics, because in reality, and as I always say in my talks — and I say it because I am 100% convinced that it is so — if you have 20 million users, or you say you have 20 million users, you are going to do your business with 1 or 2 million of those, right?

If you have 100,000, you are going to do it with 10,000 or 15,000, and if you have a thousand, you are going to do it with 100, okay?

So I think that this race to be the one with the most users that has been going on in many countries — and the reason was because the advertising market seemed to be going that way — I think that has really done a lot of damage because it has forced many media to adopt strategies of growth only.

And it is a false growth because there are many people who are in those numbers who do not even know that they have gone through your site.

Coming in February: Ismael reflects on what it was like to forgo a salary and go completely independent. And he has advice for young communication and journalism students.

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