The newsletter business model of the share-y godmothers
New media is opening spaces for new voices. Both The Squiz in Australia and Broadsheet from India are creating voices that rely on what women are good at — building relationships, and plenty of men are coming along for the ride. Laxmi Murthy and Jacqui Park start with the big question
“How do we do news for women?” asks Lakshmi Chaudhry, CEO and founder of India’s daily curated news digest, Broadsheet. The answer lies in getting the content right — conversational, engaging and accessible — understanding what they care about, recognising they are time-starved.
Broadsheet believes there’s value in catering to the educated Indian woman. She’s not necessarily in big cities, but also in Nagpur, Jaipur, Pune or Coimbatore and she consumes English-language news. “Women struggle, in the workplace, at home, with kids, and there’s a strong desire to be out in the world and to do things, hear new ideas and connect with new people. She’s always trying to broaden her life,” Chaudhry says
“We are committed to explain context: “What happened? How? Why does it matter? A lot of news reports don’t take that final step of explaining why you should care about it. Just assume you should. And if you don’t, you’re a bimbo.”
It was the same market gap identified by The Squiz in Australia: “There is certainly a hole — from a marketing perspective anyway — for reaching high-income, professional women who are short of time,” says founder Claire Kimball.
And the social secret? “Women are great sharers,” Kimball says. That’s underpinned the growth in the email newsletter’s distribution from an initial mailing list of about 900 government and communication executives when it launched in March 2017 to the 40,000-odd in-boxes and 15,000 regular podcast listeners it reaches today — three-quarters of them women — with a 45 percent open rate.
In those three years, Claire Kimball has been up at 3.30 each morning to curate The Squiz, as a weekday email newsletter along with a short podcast that deliver a digest of news you need to know to start the day, without, she says, political spin.
Slog work and early mornings are equally part of the game for Chaudhry, who has run the Broadsheet daily from her Bangalore home since its launch last April, offering: “What you need to know. Today”. News and explainers range from Trump’s impeachment inquiry to sexual harassment in sports and protests over the new citizenship act,.
So what do women want?
Broadsheet believes that news geared for women, is not necessarily about women. The notion that women only read lifestyle or entertainment — an assumption that continues to guide mainstream newsrooms in India — was belied by the women Chaudhry found around her, those she worked with or those she saw on the metro.
“Editors at the digital news publication I worked in previously were dismissive: ‘women are not interested in the news, they are not engaged in the world and only care about their beauty parlour, or their career and how to get ahead’.
“Newsroom mindsets haven’t come out of nowhere — there is a long history of newsrooms being for by and of men. So a lot of how news is explained is how news is covered. It created a very high bar for women to even inform themselves.
“Things are not written in an easy to understand way. Women get frustrated with that. They begin to feel stupid, and they may say: ‘You know what?, Forget it! I don’t like the news.’ And then there’s a lot of high decibel screaming, opinionating, debating, and knowing your opinion and being ready to do battle.”
Kimball saw an opportunity to build an audience that was looking for information without spin. “With The Squiz, we’ve worked on our balance and tone to make it factual, not punishing,” she says. “You’re not going to feel outraged. We don’t shout at people at 6:00 am.”
Kimball comes from a news consumer rather than a journalist background — she worked in corporate and political communications, including for former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. It’s been useful to not have a journalist background, she says, because she’s focussed on what the audience wants rather than trying to replicate old media.
Instead, the content in The Squiz is built around three principles: “Be authentic. Be regular. Be predictable.”
Within that framework, she builds a social component to content with a weekly interview with a subscriber called “Three Minute Squiz with….” and a weekly Squiz Shortcuts that takes a topical news item and gives the context to the story via podcast and their website.
Chaudhry launched Broadsheet with a Beta test on about 200 people (20 per cent of them men) including both power news users and those only just starting to engage. They were unsure of what the Broadsheet was setting out to do until it landed in their inbox every morning.
“It’s like when you’re walking around forever with a pebble in your shoe, you get so used to it you don’t realise it hurts, but when you finally get it out, you go ‘Ah!’, says Chaudhry. “We had a lot of people writing to us saying that they now read the news, and enjoy the news. There were women who wrote in saying: ‘ I’m at home with a baby, I just don’t have time to educate myself, and I’d feel really dumb. Now I’m so grateful I have this.’”
These pain points also apply to men, Chaudhry says. “There’s too much information. It’s hard to educate yourself. The world is increasingly a confusing place.” As a result, a third of her audience are men.
Similarly, The Squiz finds men looking for what their product offers, now making up about a quarter of their subscribers.
Sharing as a business model
Both The Squiz and Broadsheet use what women do best — build relationships.
To drive distribution, Kimball seeks subscriber volunteers as “Squizheads”. Once their sharing leads to at least five additional subscribers, they are thanked for their support and receive a Saturday Squiz email that collates some ‘best of the internet’ recommendations. They plan to engage them further with unique content and offers.
At Broadsheet, “ambassadors” promote the product, and recruit new subscribers through word of mouth and encouraging readers to forward on to their own professional and personal networks, Broadsheet created a referral system, a unique referral link, and rewards with a T-shirt for more than 20 referrals.
“We have very personalised relationships with our readers,” says Chaudhry. “So if you hit reply on a Broadsheet newsletter, my colleague Subha (Visweswaran) and I will reply immediately. We have a very chattery WhatsApp group and all our ambassadors are on it.”
The sense of apnapan (belonging in Hindi) mirrors the intimate tone of the newsletter. Who doesn’t warm to a friend telling you what news story is relevant today and why?
Kimball also stresses building bonds: “We were always only interested in developing long-term relationships with our email and podcast subscribers — and like any relationship it takes time and consistency to build trust.
“By showing up every week day and delivering our ‘shortcut to being informed’ in a way that takes a lot of care and respect for our audience means we’re not only developing a sustainable business (or at least we hope we are), but it’s a meaningful venture for us to put our blood, sweat and tears into,” she says.
Moving on and scaling up
Kimball bootstrapped the launch and focussed on growing the Squiz audience for the first year before looking for revenue from sponsorship matched with native advertising. It now draws from the Commonwealth Bank, Woolworths, Qantas, BP and Origin. These partnerships and advertising are their only income stream, although the team is thinking about what non-advertising income might look like.
The morning podcast launched in 2019 has brought a new audience. “By and large it’s a different audience to the email gang. Our view is: we need to be where our audience is, and a 6am morning podcast with an opinion-free look across the news was a no-brainer for us,” says Kimball.
To kick off 2020, The Squiz will launch ‘Squiz Kids’, a weekday news podcast for primary-aged children to be hosted by journalist and author, Bryce Corbett.
In late 2018, it gained runway funding when it’s first round of investor funding, led by ex-News Corp executive Peter Tonagh, raised almost $500,000. As a result, the team is now made up of five people with a focus on commercial growth and subscriber engagement.
And for the future? “I prefer us to be reader and listener-focused. The Squiz’s carved a space for itself. We’re excited about getting our arms further around the people we aim to serve.”
With Broadsheet launched and built to an initial 6,000 subscribers in under a year, and with a little funding in hand, Chaudhry is in a mood for expansion. “Now it’s time to be grownups, get our own office and hire staff,” she jokes.
However, she is concerned to keep the balance of scale and intimacy. Too often scaling up in India is all about the numbers, she says, with the million+ mindset as the driving force.
“If you’re in India and you haven’t chalked up the numbers, you’re a loser,” she says. “But we dug our heels in and said: No, this is going to work’. People are responding, sharing, they’re excited, they’re engaged. People love us. We’ve struck a core. It was faith in ourselves and in our audience,”
They are relying on personal relationships to fuel growth. Events such as voters’ education workshops in the form of a swayamvar (an obsolete tradition where a woman chooses her partner out of a varied line-up) were branded as outreach and publicity for Broadsheet. This month they are launching book clubs led by their ambassadors.
Broadsheet is flying in the face of the conventional wisdom about media in India. And the validation comes from its audiences. Chaudhry says she has done news all her life but never had a reader writing to thank her for “being there” or merely for existing
Revenue models are organically emerging out of relationships with the Broadsheet audiences, both online and offline. “When paywalls first made an appearance, it wasn’t clear that Indians were actually willing to pay. For us, in the end, our business model is going to be some paid version. But we don’t really think of it as a paywall and our audience doesn’t think of us a news brand, a media brand.”
Whether it is the about-to-be-launched podcast series, or video guides to personal finance, Broadsheet aims to be part of its audience’s everyday lives in one way or the other. Chaudhry says:“There will be tiers that you pay for, but it’s about building connections.”
Laxmi Murthy is a journalist, writer and researcher based in Bengaluru. Jacqui Park is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology, Sydney. Together they write The Story.
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