Why we should involve our subscribers in our newsletters

How can we involve our subscribers in our newsletters and why would we want to?

Let's start with the why. Here are two useful insights out of many in The Local News Playbook, a new detailed report by FT Strategies into the sustainability of local news media:

1.  “Effective audience engagement depends on creating direct, two way

relationships that meet people where they are and feel personal, responsive and conversational.”

2. “Newsletters are the most important retention tool for LNOs [Local News Organisations], showing the value of direct, owned channels.”

So…audiences want conversations with local news organisations - to shape coverage and feel like they have a personal relationship. Meanwhile, newsletters are one of the best ways of maintaining a direct relationship with audiences that isn't beholden to algorithms. And if this is the case with local news media, it's fair to assume that subscribers to other newsletters about the causes and places they care about are looking for this connection too.

The challenge is that newsletters have traditionally been a one way form of communication (“here’s today’s news”, “here’s the story behind our work”, "here are ways you can get involved" etc).

In a future post, we'll cover some of the ways you can involve with the readers in the creation of your newsletters, but firstly here are two non-newsroom examples that are creative and quirky, and are genuinely collaborative.

Lia’s Living Almanac

Each month, nature writer Lia Leendertz invites readers of her newsletter to share a sentence about their own experience of that particular time of year, which she stitches together into a seasonal poem. They are extremely evocative of a moment in time: January 2026's included “Hearty soups for lunch and warm white fairy lights turned on indoors at dusk”, “Silvery snowdrops and crimson cyclamen buds breaking through in the garden” and “Maltesers mini reindeers have been replaced by mini bunnies. I am outraged (I still bought some)”.

Haunted Book club: Storyteller Gav Cross and author John Reppion have launched a newsletter-based book club with a difference - you don’t have to read the story yourself because Gav will read it to you. This is followed by a live stream, which subscribers can take part in via the chat or simply observe - and the recording is sent out via newsletter. The techy side of this is  fairly simple to do this on Substack, where their newsletter is hosted.

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