Cultural Content with guest 'maxwell museums'
Cultural Content with guest 'maxwell museums'
The Design Museum's Senior Media & PR Manager, Maxwell Blowfield, discusses newsletters and the missed opportunity they represent for the sector
Good morning Team Content,
I’m really excited about today’s post. It comes from fellow Substack-writer Maxwell, who you may know from his ‘maxwell museums’ moniker and newsletter.
Maxwell’s worked in PR at the British Museum and Sir John Soane’s Museum. He’s currently Senior Media and PR Manager for the Design Museum. He’s been in charge of getting big PR scoops for the likes of the British Museum’s Stonehenge exhibition and the Ai Weiwei exhibition (on now) at the Design Museum.
Today he’s writing for Cultural Content about the role newsletters can play in the cultural sector, and how their potential for PR opportunities is often overlooked. In the sector we’re generally good at creating great content, but often less good at telling the world about it. This posts digs into just that, and how newsletters – done well – can be an effective distribution mechanism for just that.
Over to Maxwell…
If you hadn’t noticed, newsletters are a big deal in media right now. While they’ve been a core tool for marketers for years, only recently have publishers and media organisations seemed to fully recognised their potential benefits.
Despite the slow start however, the past twelve months have seen newsletters embraced to such an extent that whole editorial strategies are being created around them.
For example, mega UK newspaper group Reach plc (publisher of the Daily Mirror, Daily Express and hundreds of other titles) have launched newsletter-first local news brands, reversing the longtime practice of websites being the “flagship” means of content delivery.
There’s new major digital start-ups like Semafor, launching off the back of a core set of niche newsletters to drive quick growth.
And some of today’s biggest media organisations are nothing but newsletters. The Hustle, 1440 and Morning Brew are just some of the multi-million-dollar brands — reaching millions of people each day – where the core products are flagship daily newsletters.
But why are newsletters now so popular with publishers?
Ultimately, it’s because they help them make more money.
And as more and more media brands double-down on subscriber-revenue models (where money is raised from charging readers to access content, rather than from advertisers), engagement is the key metric they all care about.
The more engaged a reader is, the more likely they are to convert into a paying subscriber. And more engaged subscribers are less likely to churn (cancel their subscription).
Email newsletters grow engagement. And engagement grows revenue.
How do they do this? Firstly, emails take content and deliver it directly to the reader. They bypass the algorithms of platforms like Google and Facebook.
These platforms decide for themselves what they show users. They also make major changes to their algorithms which can overnight throttle traffic and eyeballs.
Emails also land in the inbox, which is a very personal space. It is a place that many will check regularly. This can foster a deeper connection with the reader, helped by the fact that inboxes are broadly free from the junk content, fake news and general noise of social media feeds.
And if an email lands in an inbox, it’s often because the recipient wants it there. They’ve likely already offered their email address to receive it. So every newsletter issued is going to a list of already very-engaged readers — prime targets to convert into paying subscribers.
So we’ve established that newsletters are good news for a publisher's bottom line. But I also believe they are good news for PRs like me too.
A PR— someone who works in public relations — has many strands to their work. But the core function of the job is to secure media coverage for your employer (or your client if you’re agency-side). It means getting publishers to write about you, for free.
The newsletter revolution offers a really exciting new opportunity to achieve this core goal.
The main reason being that newsletters can increase a PR’s coverage tally. They offer vast new real estate to get your project or client’s name into.
This ranges from round-up or review newsletters from established publishers, such as the i's weekly Culture Fix newsletter or Metro’s The Slice. Then there’s new independent publications such as former Culture Minister Lord Ed Vaizey’s weekly Vaizey View. A prime pitch target in the culture sector.
There’s Substack too. I could write a whole other post on the opportunities Substack offers to both media orgs and PRs, but the TLDR version is that there are now thousands of new independent publications being written by journalists, creatives and thought leaders in any niche you can think of. That includes this very publication you are reading. And the museum-focused one I write. No matter what industry you do PR for, there’ll be a Substack out there looking for content.
But then there are also the growing opportunities offered as publishers expand fully editorial newsletters — emails where the content is bespoke. The Guardian are a year into their new newsletter strategy, which has shifted focus to offer “more dedicated, in-depth newsletters featuring original reporting and analysis.” In my role as Senior Media and PR Manager at the Design Museum, I worked on an interview with artist Ai Weiwei recently that ran only in the New York Times’ Style magazine T List newsletter. It was commissioned for the newsletter, was bylined and was bespoke to the format. It’s shorter content than a full article, but it landed in hundreds of thousands of inboxes around the world, and it was great to clinch it.
But newsletters can increase a PR’s coverage tally without any additional work too.
Publishers are already putting stories from their websites and newspapers into their expanding newsletter portfolios. If your story ends up being included in one of these newsletters, I believe it should be included in coverage reports.
Why? Because an appearance in a newsletter is a massive endorsement of a story (and by extension a PR’s work). Even if a newsletter is nominally an aggregator of already published stories, such as the Daily Telegraph’s Front Page, they are nearly always these days crafted — and curated — by journalists. Often they are even authored by a senior journalist. So if you land one of these slots, someone has made the editorial decision that the story deserves to be there at the expense of another. I say shout about that!
And as a bonus, some newsletters — like the Guardian’s Headlines and the Art Newspaper’s Daily — include a run-down of the most read stories over the past day. If your work appears on one of these, then your bosses should definitely hear about it.
So here’s some tips.
Firstly, subscribe to loads of newsletters. PR 101 says you can only land a successful pitch if you know and understand a publication: the topics it covers, the writers, the regular features etc. The same is true of newsletters. Only by reading them will you be able to identify opportunities. (And, as a number of publishers have newsletters exclusively for paying subscribers, make sure you're getting these too if you have access through a work account.)
Secondly, if you know a piece is about to land, make sure you are subscribed to any newsletter the publisher offers where it might be included. And make sure to check them! Media monitoring services won’t pick them up. But if you spot them yourself, then include them in your reporting and highlight why this is an extra endorsement for the piece.
Thirdly, make sure newsletters are included in your campaign targets. This will mainly be for newsletters that write new editorial content such as the NYT example above, but there are plenty out there: The Economist, Semafor, New Statesman all have similar opportunities. And then there are all the Substacks. Learn what content they want and then target your pitches towards it. There’s even an argument to be made that they are of more importance than other formats (such as broadcast or print) based on the high levels of engagement they enjoy that we’ve already discussed.
Lastly, build relationships with newsletter editors and writers in the same way PRs have long done with other journalists on the masthead. Follow them on Twitter, add them to invite lists. And make sure you thank them when they do feature your pitch. You’ll either increase your chances of them spotting your stories in future to include in their work, or you’ll increase the likelihood they will work with you repeatedly.
I hope this has been helpful. With publishers doubling-down on newsletters, I think now is the time that PRs double down on them too.
And I’ll end with the crashing sound of a second plug. As mentioned, I have my own newsletter, and I’m always looking for stories or content. maxwell museums is for everyone that visits museums — whether professionally or personally. So if you’re a PR reading this, feel free to add me as the first name on your exciting new newsletter pitch list. See you in the inbox. hello@maxwellmuseums.com
That’s it for this week. Hope to see some of you at Museum Tech this Wednesday (3rd May).
Got an interesting story to tell that might be of interest to the Cultural Content readers? Got a question about content you’d like to talk through? drop me a line – georgina@onefurther.com, I’d love to hear from you.