Teaching & Speaking
Newsletter Strategies for Journalists: How to create, grow & monetize newsletters
I taught Newsletter Strategies for Journalists: How to create, grow, and monetize newsletters from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin.
I developed the curriculum and taught the four-week course in partnership with my co-instructors. Together, we created and curated the content for the course, which included video lectures, readings, exercises, and more.
The course initially took place in spring 2021, but it is now free and available to anyone who’s interested in learning the fundamental skills required to launch and maintain a newsletter through a standard product life cycle and how a newsletter can fit into your work product and serve your audience.
Resources:
Hearken Engagement Innovation Summit: Solution Set Live!
I led a series of election-focused lightning chats with a variety of news organizations that shared their approaches to campaign coverage within the Solution Set framework.
Participants then broke into small groups with each of the presenters to dive more deeply into what they learned from their work, and how it can be applied to future coverage.
Resources:
Newsletter Wizards
I co-created a card-based strategy game to help journalists and leaders from news organizations think through their approach to email newsletters. I guided small groups of participants through the process of creating a new newsletter product that meets an outlet’s editorial and business outcomes. Groups developed strategies that meet specific goals and had to overcome ~ magical ~ hurdles and challenges that we throw in their way.
I also guided participants through a series of discussion topics and exercises based around the key workstreams of an email newsletter development and production: user research, content creation, workflows, acquiring new email readers, and converting readers to members or subscribers.
I co-presented versions of the game at the following conferences in 2019: SRCCON, Word Camp for Publishers, and ONA.