 Hello everyone. Welcome to today's edition of content web, where we talk about content publishing, design and development. I'm your host Abhishek Rai. I'm founder of Shaq, media company for the businesses. It's a community for indie business and rebel entrepreneurs. I have been sending a weekly newsletter for more than two and a half years. Today's focus is again newsletter as as it was last time. As I call that newsletter is the new photography. Everyone wants to do it because sub-stack has come and then in our Indian platform, scroll stack has been launched and from individuals it has it has shifted from the organizations to the individuals. But doing a good newsletter has become as as it has become very easy for anyone to build a newsletter because you can just log in and create an account and do something. Writing a good newsletter is a pain in the backside. A lot of people struggle with it. How to structure, how to get thoughts, how to get topics, how to get ideas. In today's newsletter, in today's session of content web, we have Rohan from scroll who had conceived their first newsletter called political fix and he has he had launched it and he has grown its audience and it was among the first few newsletters who have this proper approach towards taking it to the larger audience. He will be sharing how he started it, what were the challenges he faced, why did he choose one technology over the other and how he grew the audience and in the process he will also unravel the content strategy about it. So the session will have two parts to it. In the first part, Rohan will introduce his approach, his newsletter, how it happened and where it's going in the future. In the next, once he ends the presentation for 15-20 minutes, I'll take over and then I'll ask questions from Rohan. I have a few questions which I had studied research and then we will make it open for the audience to ask questions if they want, which I will put to Rohan and he will answer those questions. Over to you Rohan. Thanks so much Abhishek and I'd like just like to thank you and has geek for you know having me on. It's very easy to get journalists to give gyan and so you know when we have a platform and people are actually listening that's a nice thing. So thanks for having me on. Abhishek told me before a couple of days before that people tend to have presentations for these for the content web sessions and so I had to pull out my rusty PowerPoint skills and then I suddenly got into you know all the fun animations and things so if you see some silly stuff or just a shoddy presentation skills here please you know forgive me. But yeah I'd like to talk about newsletters a bit. Let me let me open up the the presentation. Here we go. I think that works. So yeah that's the political fix. So to give you a bit of background scroll began six years ago and I've been a part of this independent news organization from the very beginning and before that I was a journalist a city journalist in Delhi and even before that went to journalism school in the States and grew up in the Middle East and to me I've sort of grown up on the internet digital is home for me. I read newspapers all my life but really grew up writing on the internet and so for me that spaces is completely native and in some ways when I joined a newspaper in Delhi when I moved to India and started working in journalism I had to unlearn a lot of things that were standard to me about journalism and had to figure out how to fit into space on the paper and things like that. But to me one of the real mediums that worked a lot for me from a young age was blogs. So before you'll see a bit of a fun yeah there we go a little spin animation that you know I pulled out after many many years but yeah I want people to remember blogs I wish I could I spoke a little bit about this earlier and again I grew up really writing on blogs it was an amazing technology I was on something called Zanga which is probably very old to many people at least younger folks but around live journal and blog spot this was one of those things where a lot of the Indian community was on and you got to get direct feedback which is the great thing about Zanga you build a community you speak to people but they also get criticism on your writing immediately and you start to think of how to mold it to your audience very early on from when I was 13 I was writing on Zanga a little later I came up with a terrible idea in in the US while I was a journalism school or at least the pun in the name was really bad it was called subcontinental breakfast the idea was that it would be a daily roundup of news stories in India one of the things about Indian journalism and this has changed in the last five years or so is that it's extremely hard to access it's full of acronyms and presumed knowledge you can open the front page of you know the biggest selling newspaper in the country and actually have no idea what it's talking about and another thing that is was a big thing a decade ago and is less and less so it's still a thing is that if you were at the times of India you were not allowed to say that the Hindustan times has said something interesting you're not allowed to credit anything else and on the websites of these companies you're not allowed to link out they thought it would be endangering their traffic and why should we send traffic to competitors and so on and so what I often found was that being able to access what's happening across the Indian new space especially as an NRI and then as someone who is studying in the States was really hard I would have to go to 10 different sites there was one thing that I would like to remind you of in addition to blogs which is this wonderful product called Google Reader which there's a big community that really wishes this was still around it was a an RSS reader basically direct feeds from websites posting updates or blogs and you could get it all in one place I'd bring it up here partly because looking at this interface now you actually see that it actually looks a lot like your inbox these days you know Gmail doesn't look too different from this and back then email was to some extent a little more personal now your email has lots and lots of other things happening in it and although Google Reader is gone I would pose it that you know the inbox is being treated as the new Google Reader in some ways because newsletters are filling it up so to give you a sense of one of the newsletters that really influenced me early on is something called political playbook I'm going to focus a little more on journalistic newsletters today because that is the sort of medium that I have focused on entirely it's not I don't have too much experience with with brand newsletters and things like that so I'll give you a sense of you know journalism in this space political was this brand new publication in the mid 2000s late 2000s possibly that tried to cover politics like ESPN covered sports their idea was that you'll get minute-to-minute updates you'll get super interesting commentary you don't have to wait for two days for or wait for the weekend for the Sunday magazine to tell you what to think about the news you can think about it right away and they had this extremely dull looking newsletter called playbook that became like massively influential in Washington the idea or the motto of the newsletter was drive the day the idea being that it would be put out and everyone who matters in DC's political space would be reading this the folks who started it Mike Allen would wake up every morning at 4 a.m. and and have it out by 9 a.m. so that it's in your blackberries which is what people were reading things on back then as the iPhone started to show up and and that you would know exactly what's happening and and like I said Indian journalism was not linking out playbook didn't have that problem at all the whole top of this newsletter was saying this is what's on the front page of the New York Times this will this is what's coming out tomorrow on the Washington Post this is what we've heard linking was all over the place telling people what's on the TV shows was all over the place and and I found political really an easy way to get a sense of what's happening in American politics and wished there was something like that for India and so when we started scroll a year in I started something called the daily fix in which I did something similar for for a month I in fact stopped going out and stopped drinking so that I would wake up every morning at 5 a.m. read all the newspapers the idea of it was that I would read the newspapers you know the average reader can't spend their mornings reading six different newspapers I had to do it any less for my work so I'll read it and distill the most interesting and important bits and feel free to link out a lot to get aside this idea that linking out was bad and you know now it seems assumed conventional wisdom but back then it wasn't in the Indian journalism space I wanted to sell the idea that if readers start to pay attention to my voice trust me to pull out the most interesting things from across the new space they will keep coming back to me even if they click through to some of those links and find you know journalism that we at scroll which is this tiny independent news organization could not do we couldn't cover the whole country we couldn't go deep onto certain beats but we could tell you which which stories are relevant which ones you should pay attention to and the idea was that you would sort of get attached to my voice so this is something I started on scroll in 2015 but at the time we were not confident about newsletters and so we ended up putting it on the site it didn't land in your inbox it was something that would show up on scroll.in and people would get used to it but the the major difference was because it was an article the way it spread was through its headline rather than through its content and so over time we had to be a little more vocal and louder with the headline or more sharper with our content and it it was a bit of a mismatch because while the material the content on the daily fix was most suited to landing in your inbox at the time we were not certain the newsletters would be something that you know could sell for a small news organization in india and so that was the daily fix let me give you a little bit of a sense of what was on it I called it everything the subhead was everything you need to know for the day and a little more I would have a bit of analysis a whole bunch of links to the top op-eds a don't miss section where you know a big article for the day but again this is going up on the site cut to oh at the same time scroll did have a newsletter but it was called the daily brief and the daily brief is your standard sort of newsletter which just sends you the top 10 links on scroll for the previous day it's sort of like getting the front page of the newspaper the next morning for all the stories that came the day before we still send it out every day a lot of our older readers rely on this entirely they never go to scroll or in they go simply to this but it does a very simple thing it's on the left you can see here and it just has links and and our headlines and so I started to think about the difference between these two different things and and and so a pretty fundamental shift right like so on one side you have what is our daily brief which is just links it's not really meant to be consumed in your inbox you can't open it read it through and be done for the day because it's meant for you to click through to one of those links you might think any one of those is interesting or all of them are what I was building with the daily fix was meant to be consumed in and of itself you could click through to some of those links but actually you're getting some analysis you're getting a sense of what's within those links and you might choose to go on to them if you want to again the daily brief newsletter that we sent out the link one didn't have a voice it spoke from the brand it was scrolls it didn't really have a specific note whereas the voice in the analysis on what was the daily fix was really mine people either liked what I was saying the way I said things or they did but they had to pick whether they wanted that so to me when you start to think of newsletters if people are thinking about what they want to do these are some of the key questions and I think the one I've put in black here is the most important which is what is your objective from a newsletter news organizations are you know like many I'm sure like brands which is that you see everyone doing newsletters and we're like okay we should do one as well but they're often confused about what exactly they expect out of it do they want people to click through and so drive a lot of traffic to the website and so get advertising revenue from it do they want to build a community of people that they can reach out to for events for specific sales or things like that do they just want to build up the brand's image I think setting your objective is extremely important whether in the journal just a link heavy newsletter and something that could be consumed directly in your inbox of course there's a few other things like do you already have a list a space of a set of people you know one convenient thing about scroll is that we already had an audience of 10 million people reading us every month and so there were people I could reach out to so I could build my newsletter audience based on a subset of that 10 million audience but at the same time I still had to make sure it was specific enough that people would actually want to read you know many people might give their email addresses or sign up initially but a common thing on on newsletters just like any news product or any product online is churn where people sign up and then they drop it pretty soon after they're not paying attention it goes into spam or the promotions mail and it goes away after a little while just a couple of other things to me one big question you always have to set yourself is how big do you want to be a key problem I saw in in the way just news products were built in the 2000s was that people saw oh you know there's a huge audience online so let's get to all of them and when you try and get to all of them you're most likely not going to get to anyone or you need to have times of india level money you know to put in and be able to reach the large audience so it's more useful to think whether you're subject to specific enough there is a set of people so for me at the political fix or at the daily fix earlier the idea was people who are news junkies people who want to pay attention to the news but don't have the time in the mornings to read through six seven eight newspapers and they will trust me to do that for them people who want to pay attention without having to do all the work in paying attention I found that a specific enough space it was the idea of political a little bit but not so insidery we're not telling you what each MP is doing on a day-to-day basis but the idea was you want to pay attention to the news in india and political policy spaces but not don't want to do all the work the last question is is it monetizable which is a big question in journalism and newsletters in general but the the second on the other side of that slash is is it sustainable and I don't mean in terms of financial viability but can you do it every day I was waking up every morning at 5 a.m writing this newsletter and then going on to my regular day job which was doing journalism reporting writing editing so after a while it actually came to a place where scrolls the daily fix which was our daily article not a newsletter was actually had a stable of writers we with three of us writing and then four of us writing and it would switch around so the voice switched and it still remain interesting but after a while we realized it was not sustainable and so last year we sort of retired the daily fix as a as an article on the site although it became a comment piece for the morning on scroll.in but last year I tried a pop-up newsletter essentially going up to the elections in 2019 I thought people might have an interest in following the elections in india whether people are in india or outside there might be a surge of interest around the elections and I thought what what better a time to to try out what I've learned about newsletters what people may want to pay attention to and I started something called the election fix it was meant to be a limited run newsletter going from march april and may these are the you know the months of campaigning and the elections themselves in over april and may with the results at the end of may and so it was meant to be a three-week three-month experiment in which again I did some of the same things I had analysis I had links to interesting pieces around the web I had one link that you had to get to and I would also occasionally throw in some funny stuff interesting twitter conversations things like that that I'm the filter for you because things are happening constantly at the end of that three-month period there was enough interest enough of a of a sign-up set and lots of people really liking the election fix which I'll grant you was also on scroll.in's website so I was able to get the big audience on the website while also building up a list and so we converted that to a political fix which became initially a weekly newsletter on which I called it a weekly newsletter on Indian policy and politics from scroll.in I was running feedback surveys constantly I had a google form open all the time for people to tell me what they thought about and let me tell you what the political fix is today it's no longer weekly newsletter I put it out twice a week so on Mondays I give you an analysis piece and on Fridays I give you links and over the last two months I've started doing Q&As with recent authors or people who have written papers in the policy space attached to this some of that idea is that also maybe people are getting tired of just my voice but also the more outside people you bring into it you reach their audiences as well so so while I had reached a certain space based on just my own following let's say online or scrolls bringing other voices in also made the content more interesting but got to reach those people's audiences they might be niche they might have been some of them are professors of policy in in American universities or Indian universities might be a niche but you know all of those students signing up all of fellow academics signing up is it interesting enough audience for me as a newsletter and someone I can I can target to whether it's through advertising or for in whatever way that it is useful for me to reach them I kept I responded to every email and and at this point the political fix moved from MailChimp to sub stack I'm not going to talk about tech too much in my presentation we can talk about it with Abhishek and next week you guys are going to hear from my colleague from Ritesh who runs a scroll stack so you'll hear more about maybe tech on that but the little things on the back end that I paid attention to opening rates how often people were clicking through and of course whether I'm I'm building my audience this is sort of what it looks like right now on the left side is the political fix the Monday one in which I give you analysis of what's going on in India on Fridays and doing a Q&A where we talk to someone interesting recent so that's that's a sense of what it looks like on sub stack at the moment I have a few suggestions it's already 20 minutes in Abhishek we can you can you know stop me at any point but a few things that I have learned over time in terms of newsletters and a few newsletters I really like money stuff is this very interesting newsletter from a Bloomberg writer named Matt Levin or Levine I'm not sure how you pronounce his last name he's a deep finance guy I think he used to work in finance but and it's often like not in my space at all because I don't do finance I write about the economy but not like hard finance stuff and yet I find his newsletter extremely easy to read and access because the one thing that Matt does over and over again is that he will explain the simple concept of what is an IPO every time on his newsletter he'll make it interesting he's not using a stock phrase but he does not presume that everyone reading has read all his previous articles his previous newsletters or knows what you know they're what he's talking about and so one of the key things I found with newsletters is that feel free to repeat concepts to link back to give excerpts from your previous stuff and don't presume knowledge people are joining your newsletter at any given moment this week you might have signed up a bunch of people who have not read anything in the past so feel free to keep repeating things quads succession which used to be daily is now moved to a weekly thing and now I know are two super fun newsletters that basically do a deep dive into into a random thing every every day or every week and they've built up large audiences now I know is this huge newsletter and basically he gives you one one piece of trivia every day and I thought this sort of thing wouldn't work people aren't going to pay attention but actually or maybe they won't open it in their inbox but both of these seem to be doing reasonably well and they are not afraid to go into like deep subjects which I find interesting I'm going to give a surprising suggestion here but the Times of India actually has a great newsletter called the Time Stop 10 it is a really good way of following Indian news on a daily basis it's not going to give you too much commentary or analysis but it will give you a sense of the depth and breadth of news that is in the Times of India I granted this is the Times and they have six or seven people working on this as opposed to me who still has to do you know the political fix myself but it's super consistent and it gives you something every day. Stratitary on the other hand is Ben Thompson's blog that became a newsletter it's a paid newsletter except for one article a week that does great great analysis of tech and the media space it's and he's managed to make it work on one stack through a paid platform. A couple of other things one little suggestion I give to everyone is that you put something in the bottom of your newsletter that's interesting that people will want to come back to both Vox sentences and the interface do this they put fun twitter things or an interesting link at the bottom and so it's a little incentive it's a hook for people to read all the way through so I often put a don't miss link or or something funny on on Indian Twitter at the bottom of a newsletter just you know maybe you don't want to read all the analysis that week but you might enjoy the you know the zen moment that the John Stuart used to have at the end of the daily show and always respond to people always get back to people I put in hotpot there which is a great newsletter now paid that has built the podcast community in America and does great analysis on industry stuff regarding podcasts but what Nick Hoer writes it does really well is build communities talk directly to the people who are involved in that space so I've talked a lot and very quickly here there's some some resources that I can throw up there for if people want to and you can always check in with me on Twitter or over email if you have questions and any newsletter writer that you like my suggestion is it shouldn't be hard to reach out directly to them because people are very accessible in this space it's not yet jumped the shark of being like podcast large but it's getting there in in a sense but people I'm sure will always be happy to respond