RJI Fellow’s ongoing e-newsletter personalization experiment yields surprising results

Tracy Clark, a 2015-2016 RJI Fellow, believes newspapers with editor-selected email newsletters would have better engagement rates if the content were personalized to each user’s interest. She is in the midst of a pilot study with a large U.S. newspaper, which is simultaneously publishing two email newsletters: one includes editor-selected news content, the other features reader-selected stories. The personalized newsletters are based on Clark’s Reportory platform. This is a progress report.

Mobile long-form journalism: The future is (even more) visual

Three RJI Research Scholars spent the past year studying the effectiveness and sustainability of long-form digital journalism. This is the fifth in a five-part series based on 53 interviews with millennials to gauge this audience’s reception to long-form journalism delivered on mobile platforms.

FL#161: 5 tips for email newsletters

Email newsletters Email newsletters are far from new, but recently there’s been a resurgence in their popularity. With this renewed interest come new techniques. We look at five innovative approaches to delivering newsletters, inspired by Clover Letter, BuzzFeed and TheSkimm.Reporting by Whitney Matewe. For more information: BuzzFeed has 12 core newsletters but, in total, close … Continued

What is a social video producer?

Nina Raja is a social video producer at CNBC where she produces and edits video for the network’s various social platforms — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Vine — and its website.

Digital preservation: Why is this important to me?

Journalists are dependent upon access to back files for research and context, but those back files may no longer be there. Almost all news content created in the U.S. today is digital, but digital content is even more fragile than print and might be scattered over a variety of media and storage systems. How long … Continued

Take Action! Public-Private Partnerships: Importance/Difficulty Matrix

  EDWARD MCCAIN: [00:10] We’re going to break up into groups here in a little bit. At the first Dodging the Memory Hole we broke into groups, and we were looking at partnerships. I’ve ranked them here; and I also have some hard copies that I’m going to share with you as groups, but I wanted you to … Continued

How do we engage news consumers in the digital world?

If you operate a nonprofit newsroom, email appeals have likely become an essential fundraising tool. Yet while recommendations for how to grow your mailing lists are readily available, it’s much harder to find good information about retaining subscribers and engaging them as active community members. As a result, many successful efforts to gain subscribers are … Continued