A New Way to Discover Important Stories Not Making Headlines
Raise your hand if you read beyond the front page of a news site.
Don’t be embarrassed if your hand isn’t (virtually) raised. Many of us have seen the study that only 6 in 10 Americans read beyond news headlines, and our own user interviews here at Acciyo unveiled how even the most active news readers rarely go beyond what’s published on the homepage of whichever news site they subscribe to.
And how could you? There’s no easy way to digitally “flip” to page two news.
But what if there’s something beyond page one that impacts you? A news story that may not be trending but is important? Or perhaps there’s a story that’s developing that may become headline news — but by the time it does, it’s too difficult to catch up.
Our team decided to fix that.
Introducing Below the Fold
Below the Fold is a weekly newsletter that surfaces important stories not making headlines. There are plenty of news newsletters already hitting your inbox repeating the latest in Trump land — I literally got an email while writing this post from a top national paper and all ten stories were about our current president.
Instead, our team is digging through the trenches of news publications to uncover and surface the stories you either miss or don’t have time to discover.
Content you can expect to see
For now, Below the Fold is a weekly newsletter reaching your inbox every Friday morning. You can expect to see:
Page 2 News
We’ll start with a selection of 2–3 stories our team discovered over the past week not shared on any digital homepage.
Issues Watch
Our product team put together a stock ticker for election issues so you can get a quick glimpse of which items were discussed more or less in the past week’s news cycle.
Basically, we’ve built a quick query that shows the difference in number of articles published on front page news feeds between a week ago and the week our newsletter is delivered to you.
Forecast
When appropriate, we’ll include events scheduled the following week that you should be aware of, and may even lead to future headlines.
#AskingForAFriend
From time-to-time, our blog will break down stories that have been mentioned frequently that you might have missed. Sometimes, so much time has passed since a story broke that it feels awkward to ask what’s going on now. We’ll get you caught up.
At least that’s where we’re starting. We’re still playing with our database and initial subscriber audience to improve what you see. For example, we’re about to start experimenting with local news stories in a few select cities to help bring local relevance to your news digest.
The team behind this
This newsletter is powered by Acciyo, a startup I started with my co-founder Vivian to help news readers get historical context on the news as they read it. While you can learn more about that here, we set out to build this newsletter in alignment with our thesis to help readers actually understand the world they live in. We’re lucky to be joined by two powerhouse women in media to round out our editorial team.
Ellen Minkin: Ellen has been a news producer for over seven years. She helps keep the newsletters coverage in check and edit the content.
Judith Alba: Jay is our incredible writer for both the newsletter and supporting blog content. She’s written for a number of publications.
Vivian Diep: Vivian built the election ticker and is experimenting with different ways we can use data to better inform readers on what’s happening.
Anum Hussain: I handle all things marketing and audience. If you respond to any of our weekly emails, you’ll be sure to hear back from me.
Let us scroll below the fold for you
We’re a bit bias, but we think a newsletter like this is critical for everyone to be reading. To subscribe, simply click here or below.
