New York Times Newsletter The Morning Crosses 5.5 Million Daily Readers

Five days a week––and soon to be seven––an audience bigger than the population of South Carolina all reads the same email. The Morning, a daily newsletter written by journalist David Leonhardt and produced by a full-time team of eight, is regularly opened by more than 5.5 million people per day, according to The New York Times. In August, Nieman Lab reported that The Morning had accrued 17 million total subscribers, The free product lands in inboxes around 6:30 a.m. Eastern, where readers can scroll through its topical news coverage, all written in a deliberately conversational tone. Every issue explores one key story—often the latest Covid-19 news—before breaking into thematic sections like Morning Read, Arts and Ideas and Play, Watch, Eat. “The goal of The New York Times is to provide you with a breadth and depth of journalism that is worth subscribing to, and The Morning is adjacent but not identical to that goal,” Leonhardt said. “You don't have to pay to get The Morning. We want to provide you with a valuable product that you don't have to subscribe to—one that is available to anyone and everyone.” The success of The Morning reflects the growing prominence of newsletters in publishers’ editorial strategies. In August, the Times announced the rollout of 18 subscriber-only email products, and earlier this week The Atlantic announced the first nine members of its contracted newsletter program. While these initiatives explicitly aim to boost acquisition and retention by increasing the value of a subscription, free newsletter products like The Morning are key to building habit, which also plays a critical, if less direct role in cultivating repeat reading. Nearly 50% of Times subscribers open a newsletter in a given week, according to the publisher. Free products like The Morning also generate revenue through advertising, though the Times declined to provide financial details. The New York Times Debuts 18 Subscriber-Only Newsletters The road to 5.5 million The Times launched Morning Briefing, the predecessor of The Morning, in 2014. In 2019, the publisher tightened its registration process, requiring readers to provide their email in exchange for access to an article. When a reader registered their email or became a Times subscriber, they were placed on the Morning Briefing email list. The change, along with the frenetic news environment of 2020, led to a massive influx of email addresses––the Times announced in May that it had surpassed 100 million registered readers––and prompted executives to allocate more resources to the product. As a highly visible component of its onboarding process, the newsletter served as many readers’ first introduction to the Times experience. It's not simply a digest of headlines. We're going to try to talk.David Leonhardt, The New York Times In May 2020, after several months of planning, Leonhardt took over the newsletter, and its name was changed to The Morning. Its rapid growth since then stems in part from readers’ desire to establish a daily news-consuming routine, Leonhardt said. A.G. Sulzberger, the chairman and publisher of the Times, has told its journalists that the Times now has four front pages: the print edition, the digital home page, its podcast The Daily and its newsletter The Morning. “It turns out that checking in once a day to the news of the world is a useful rhythm,” Leonhardt told Adweek. “It's a rhythm that I think will outlive the specific technology of print.” Changing the newsletter tone The casual tone of The Morning is deliberate: Leonhardt wants the reader to feel as if he is talking to them. Newsletters and podcasts naturally create a feeling of intimacy, and the stickiness of these relationships can help convert non-subscribers and retain paying readers. “It's not simply a digest of headlines. We're going to try to talk,” Leonhardt said. “So I try to be more conversational and even, in certain cases, admit when we don’t know something or ask the readers for their thoughts.” Expansion to the weekend The Times plans to expand The Morning from five days to seven by early 2022, Leonhardt said. Currently, the publisher has no Saturday newsletter, but it runs Weekend Briefing on Sunday. As part of the transition, Weekend Briefing will be folded into The Morning. The weekend versions of The Morning will not be identical to the weekday versions, according to Leonhardt. Instead, especially on Sunday, the newsletter hopes to follow in the tradition of sharing longer reads that draw more heavily from arts and culture sections. As the newsletter expands, the team is focused on improving the quality of The Morning: making it more concise, more essential, more accessible. But growing the size of its audience is less of a concern. “It would be great to grow the reader numbers, but they're already enormous,” Leonhardt said. “Our first focus is continuing to do a good job and figuring out a way to do a better job.” The New York Times' CEO Meredith Levien on Balancing News and Lifestyle Products