BBC News is targeting news avoiders with a “gateway” newsletter that highlights on inspiring, uplifting and lighthearted stories from across its output.
The Upbeat, which launched in October, aims to drive engagement in terms of both page views and creating habitual user habits with BBC News content.
Zoe Tabary, senior news editor, told The Audiencers Festival in London on Tuesday that the weekly newsletter has exceeded expectations, with about 160,000 subscribers in the UK.
About 50,000 of those are people who opted into that newsletter specifically, while the rest receive it based on their interests because they have separately agreed to receive emails and have been identified as news avoiders who have shown an interest in uplifting stories. Tabary said the BBC has a “massive” user database from asking people to sign in, which “allows us to target people based on the interests they express to a pretty granular level”.
The latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that news avoidance (people saying they deliberately avoid the news often or sometimes) has risen from 29% to 40% in the past eight years.
Tabary said BBC News is already well aligned with people who are heavy news users, but that adapting its editorial offering is critical to reach others.
She cited BBC research that found more than half of people wanted news that makes them feel better about the world.
Tabary said the newsletter’s tone and impartiality is key.
She said the aim is not to make light of serious issues or say what is good or bad news, but to frame stories as uplifting or inspiring and strike that tone “very carefully”.
For example Tabary cited the story of Olympian Chris Hoy’s cancer diagnosis – but specifically a follow-up about the number of men who had gone out to get tested after he first spoke about it.
Other stories that have featured in the newsletter include: “The first Brit to walk on the moon?”, “Man in Norway wakes to find huge ship in garden”, and “What joke made this class the funniest in Britain?”
Teams around the BBC, including in the Nations and Regions across the UK, now get in touch to have their content featured. Tabary said the ideal is to make sure it is something a wide range of audiences can relate to and is not too niche.
But she also said: “I think a very easy trap with an uplifting newsletter is to fall into cute animal videos or stories, or to go with only content about celebs, which we know draws clicks, but can easily come across as kind of a puff piece.”
Tabary said The Upbeat’s clickthrough rate is consistently above 4%, one of the highest for a BBC News newsletter, and said: “That is the aim. We are chasing clicks.”
This is a different strategy to some other BBC News newsletters such as Laura Kuenssberg’s Off Air in which the political journalist writes exclusive content each week. The aim of that is to keep people within the newsletter itself and build a community around it.
In addition, Tabary said, The Upbeat has the highest proportion of female and young readers compared to other newsletters.
She added that its open rate is consistently in the high 50% range (although there are well-documented issues with open rates as Apple now automatically opens emails for many users, inflating the numbers).
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
