Reach is launching a series of topic-based free Substack newsletters as part of its bid to broaden and deepen its current estimated monthly UK audience of 35 million (per Ipsos iris).
Reach has 450 newsletters in total across its portfolio produced by titles including the Mirror, Express, Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo and dozens of regional newsbrands.
Some of its recently award-nominated newsletters include the Mirror Royal Round-Up, The Money Saving Club, The Health and Wellness Club, The Northern Agenda and The Valiant covering Port Vale FC.
In 2023 Reach launched around a dozen paid-for newsletters on Substack as an experiment and this year so far it has launched more than that number again, but this time for free.
Reach sits alongside the likes of the Daily Mail and Piers Morgan in launching Substack-powered newsletters. Substack also creates a website, based on newsletter content, and supports video and audio output.
The Daily Mail launched free daily Substack-powered newsletter The Spotlight in May. Piers Morgan also launched on Substack last month.
Jenna Thompson, audience and content director for secure audiences at Reach, told The Publisher Newsletter Summit in London on Tuesday that the previous paid-for launches were about specific topics written by individual expert journalists offering “something you can’t get anywhere else”, for example This is Planet Earth with Mirror environment editor Nada Farhoud.
Some were successful and others were less so, Thompson said, describing it as “a lot of experimenting”. They were not concerned with clickthroughs to Reach websites but were “were very much about keeping people in that space in the inbox and on Substack”.
The latest offerings are curated digests around a particular topic or location, with many branded as The Something Drop.
They link to Reach stories but also to other website publishers – in what Thompson described as a “reader-centric approach” – pulled together by a journalist who is an expert in that space or is at least passionate about it.
Topic-based Substack newsletters launched by Reach this year include:
- The Bookish Drop – covering books and reading trends
- Pit Lane Chronicle – F1
- The XP Drop – gaming
- Touchdown Collective – NFL
- Blood Red – Liverpool FC
- The Weird Science Drop
- The Atomic Drop – wrestling
- The Cricket Drop
- The Shoreham Journal – Sheffield United
- The Post Horn Gallop – Leicester City
- The Stroke Index – golf
Thompson said the drive is reaching people who may not have a relationship with a Reach brand already, especially in topics that they might not realise it covers.
She noted that although Reach has an average monthly reach of about 35 million people, about 69% of the UK online population, meaning there is still a large potential audience left.
The focus is therefore on keeping the new newsletters free and building relationships, Thompson added.
“I think what’s really important there is we’re demonstrating to the readers who are signing up for that, that actually we are providing all of the best information that there is to know about this topic and so some people will move on to click through to other things, and some people won’t, but they’ll still enjoy that experience and value that experience, and have built that connection with us,” Thompson said.
One of the newest launches on Tuesday was The Nottingham Drop: a daily curation of news articles about the city in a style pioneered by former Guardian journalist and Meta community manager Michael MacLeod in Edinburgh in 2023.
Other newsletters in this style from Reach so far cover the likes of Newcastle, Belfast and Bristol.
MacLeod now also has editions for London and Arsenal news and offers his round-ups for free although readers are asked to pay if they can. He has also helped other publishers such as Newsquest with The Glasgow Wrap launch their own versions.
Thompson said: “We’re really interested in that as a space – so here’s a one-stop shop with everything about this topic. We’ve done the hard work for you by cutting through the noise and bringing it all into one place.”
Why Substack? Reach taps into ‘growing community’
Asked why Substack was chosen as the right platform, Thompson cited both its “growing community engaging with variety of newsletters across variety of topics” and its “features and functionality that allow you to build a community around a topic or journalist” including the comments, notes (shorter posts more akin to tweets) and recommendations network.
For example, with Port Vale FC newsletter The Valiant, longtime Sentinel reporter Mike Baggaley has made it feel like a “shared endeavour” with readers by spending time looking at comments people are leaving and going beyond replying by using their feedback to shape future editions, Thompson said.
“He completes that circle by referring back to those things saying: ‘Oh, this actually was inspired by this reader who asked this question, and this is how that’s come about.'”
She added it is “also about just putting us in that space where people might not have that relationship with Reach, but can discover our journalists in that way”.
She compared that to what Reach does on social media, where it reached a total following across platforms of 100 million this year. “That is us trying to be where the audience are and meet them where they are.”
Meanwhile on Linkedin, Thompson said there was a similar growing community of newsletter readers where the format has “exploded”. Some of the flagship newsletters from Reach’s biggest regional brands have now started being hosted on Linkedin.
The ‘three magic ingredients’ for paid Reach newsletters on Substack
Asked about the benefits to Reach, Thompson noted that the older Substack newsletters generate revenue from subscriptions. “Our biggest successes in that space have been where we have three things, really, I would say: exclusive content that you can’t access anywhere else, a personality or a voice or expertise that’s behind that content – and Mike [Baggaley]’s a good example of that, but so is Inside Welsh Rugby, for example… and a shared passion, I think, so where we know there’s a community out there who are passionate about a particular topic.
“I’d say those are the three magic ingredients that have been most successful for those newsletters that generated revenue.”
For the new, free newsletters, Thompson said there will be some traffic that comes back to Reach through the links they share “but it’s also about building our brands, building our journalists as brands as well, so we see a real value in that too”.
Value of free newsletters ‘goes beyond pure revenue’
In an earlier session, Rob Parsons, editor of The Northern Agenda which launched in 2021 and focuses on highlighting issues affecting the North and won best individual-led news and current affairs newsletter at The Publisher Newsletter Awards later on Tuesday, spoke about the challenges of monetisation.
The newsletter has had sponsorship previously and Parsons noted he is “in a fortunate position at Reach that The Northern Agenda is part of a wider offering of newsletters, so we have newsletters that shift much bigger numbers and it’s easier to monetise”.
Parsons said: “We did look at putting it onto Substack with some of it behind the paywall and the company decided against that in the end because – part of the reason was that it would be challenging to move the whole mailing list over from our current platform to Substack without losing it all and having to start again, which was unfortunate, but I’m in a position where I don’t have to make any money out of it and I guess it performs a wider function whether I do or not,” citing his ability to put Reach at the forefront of conversations about Northern issues with political leaders.
“But if I was going to be asked what mistakes have you made and what lessons you’ve learned from doing it, I think one of them would be that I probably ought to have thought about how to monetise The Northern Agenda from an earlier stage.
“I think I was focused on ‘I want to make the newsletter as good as possible’ and actually I should have put a bit more thought into ‘how can I do it in a way that can bring revenue in?’ And that is something I’m going to start looking at a bit more.
“If there’s any advertisers who want to advertise with The Northern Agenda, I’d be very open to that. But yes, it’s something we want to do more of in future.”
Thompson described The Northern Agenda as a “really valuable product for us to have as a business” as “there is no other coverage of Northern politics in the way that Rob does it”, using this as an example that “there is value beyond the pure revenue also”.
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