The Personal is Professional: How Delia Cai Adapted Deez Links to Serve Her Audience in a Pandemic
Delia Cai shares why and how she changed her newsletter tone and added in a new “Signal Boost” section for journalists looking for work.
This is the fourth post in the Sign Me Up! series, a project that talks directly with newsletter-makers about their newsletters, and these days, specifically COVID-19 newsletters. This interview has been lightly edited for brevity. You can read the most recent post about covering local education via newsletters, featuring EducationNC’s Nation Hahn and Mary Willson, here.
If you’re reading this, odds are you’re in the same future-of-news or newsletter-obsessed field as we are. And if that’s true, you’re likely subscribed to, or have heard of, Deez Links, a daily media newsletter by Delia Cai.
Delia started Deez Links four years ago as a way to share trending media stories with her friends. Written in Delia’s personal voice and tone, the newsletter usually takes the form of a single link with Delia’s take about why it matters. It’s a great way to know the one thing fluttering around media-Twitter on any given day. Lately, however, the newsletter has taken a more personal tone in response to the pandemic.
We interviewed Delia to learn more about the evolution of her newsletter as it grew from a note to a few friends to an efficient way journalists across the country are finding job leads.
Newsletter Wizards: Tell us a bit about yourself and your newsletter. How long have you been at Buzzfeed, how did you decide to start Deez Links, and what are some of your personal favorite newsletters?
Delia: I’ve been at BuzzFeed for two and a half years [Editor’s note: She works there as the Growth & Trends Editor], but I’ve been writing Deez Links for four years, ever since I was in my first internship after college. My internship basically consisted of reading a ton of industry news all day and figuring out how to boil it down into corporate memos and an internal email that kept everyone in the company up-to-date on trends, and so that was definitely where I fell in love with newsletters.
Plus, this was around 2015–2016 when newsletters like Rusty Foster’s Today In Tabs, Ann Friedman’s newsletter, and Laura Olin’s Everything Changes newsletter were huge; they felt to me like the cool kids of the industry. I had blogged a little bit in college (I went to j-school at Mizzou and you were basically required to have a blog), so I wanted to try it out on the newsletter format and basically have something fun to do and send to my friends while we sat in our cubicles all day. I still love Ann’s and Laura’s newsletters, and I miss Rusty’s every day!!! A few other personal faves from over the years: Hola Papi, MuckRack Daily, A Woman To Know, Token mag, Ask Molly, The Collective AHP, Brass Ring Daily, Agents & Books, This Needs Hot Sauce, and The Cut’s daily one, to name a few.
Newsletter Wizards: Tell us a bit about Deez Links. What’s it about, and who is the audience?
Delia: I started Deez Links as a way to highlight one link a day (a concept borrowed from the now-defunct This., which I also miss so much!!) about interesting industry news or just cool stuff from the internet to my friends who also worked in media. The litmus test is essentially just “do I want to text this link to everyone I know right now,” and sometimes it’s like the 10,000-word New Yorker story that really is worth it, and sometimes it’s the dishy piece on Conde Nast that’s worth gossipping about. Sometimes it’s just a really smart tweet! The audience has expanded way beyond just personal friends and colleagues at this point, but I still try to write it as if I’m just composing a slightly more formal text for the group chat.
Newsletter Wizards: What changes (e.g. content, workflow, solicitations) have you made to your newsletter in response to the pandemic, and why? Could you speak about the new “Signal Boost” part of your newsletter? [Editor’s note: this is the place in the newsletter where Delia advertises jobs and media folks looking for work.]
Delia: When the pandemic first began, I wasn’t totally sure if I had the stomach, honestly, to sift through all of the really good and intense journalism being published about it, and it seemed for a while like that was really all people wanted to read about. So I tried a few different things, like just writing little pieces about a TV show that I was watching or just linking people to funny TikToks, and I got a lot of responses to those newsletters where people were like, “Honestly, thank you for this, I needed this.” So I think the definition of the “link” became much looser — it’s way less industry news stuff, more “Here’s just something worth your time,” and it could be almost anything.
At the beginning of April, I noticed that companies were starting to furlough and lay off a lot of people. I’ve posted a few job listings before as favors from friends, and so I figured this could be a cool way to help give people who were tweeting about their layoffs or the work they were losing a little more juice, since you know, the lifetime of a tweet is so short and everyone’s timelines can be so chaotic. So that was the idea behind the “Signal Boost.” I thought maybe I would get like, one listing a day to post (in keeping with the “one a day” theme), but then like 200 people DM’d me within a few days, and I was like oh sh*t, yeah that’s not going to work. The really lovely thing is that it turns out a lot of readers of Deez Links are hiring or know people who are hiring, and so I’ve heard back from a few people that they got a few leads or got interviews from the signal boost, which is honestly a relief to hear.
Newsletter Wizards: What have you noticed about your audiences’ response to these changes, if anything? Have you noticed any differences in how your audience responds to COVID-related posts versus non-COVID related posts?
Delia: I definitely get a lot more replies to the emails that have just like, the funny TikToks or the TV recommendations. But the ones that are a little more newsy or related to coronavirus coverage get shared more on Twitter…which I think is interesting. There’s probably something to that, in that people like to publicly share the more serious stuff. But to be fair, there was definitely a period of time when it just felt very gauche to tweet anything that wasn’t about the pandemic. (But I think that has changed in the past few weeks; people are adapting and things feel slightly less dire.)
Newsletter Wizards: What have you learned about newsletter strategy during the pandemic?
Delia: One thing I’ve noticed while reading both old newsletters of mine and also just all the promotional emails that I get from brands is that the tone is way more personal.
I used to write Deez Links in a very “royal we” tone; that was something leftover from the time when I was just writing it as a joke to my friends and pretending Deez Links was a big built-out media company. I had been using the first person more within the past year or so, but once the pandemic hit, I know I consciously started writing things in a waaaay more personal tone, like it wasn’t just “This link is cool because XYZ,” but “I think this is super interesting because XYZ,” and adding like a little more earnestness and personal stuff. I think one email was literally like “I slept for 12 hours last night so today I just have some cat videos for you.”
I think newsletters should always be written in a more voicey, friendly tone in general, but it’s even more important now when no one wants to be condescended to by a faceless brand. I feel like every email I’ve gotten from brands is even like, I honestly hope you’re okay, but listen, if you are bored, here’s the pajama sale we have going on. Less cutesy, corporate-y bullshit. Everyone is being a little more human and direct. Because it just feels weird to pretend like we all aren’t all just individual people behind that screen, hoping for the best for each other.
If that’s not an uplifting way to end a newsletter blog, we don’t know what is! But to pivot to the practical here, writing a newsletter in a personal tone to a specific audience is a piece of advice we cover in more detail in The Newsletter Guide, a guide we co-authored along with Joseph Lichterman at the Lenfest Institute and Jacque Boltik at YellowBrim.
Next week, we’ll feature our first look at newsletter strategy outside of the U.S — from national British daily newspaper The Telegraph.
