In a time of AI and automation, newsletters are becoming an increasingly useful — and viable — product for local media companies that want to add value for readers on a hyper-local level.

Here, I’ll cover a couple of recent local media cases focused on automated newsletters for different use cases.

Lookout Local’s neighbourhood newsletters: hyper-local and unique

At the Local Media Association’s recent conference in Chicago, I caught up with Ken Doctor, a local media veteran and founder of Lookout Local, a relatively new local digital news publisher.

He launched the first site, Lookout Santa Cruz, in his California hometown five years ago this November. The company is now five months into the life of its second site Lookout Eugene-Springfield (Oregon).

The story of Lookout Local is an uplifting must-read. It’s about a team with a vision for a digital community newspaper that is really executing on so many of its great ideas. Here, we’ll focus on the use of newsletters.

In addition to its topical and daily newsletters, which are free and constitute the top of the membership funnel, Lookout Local (both locations) also produces and distributes neighbourhood newsletters (also free). It uses AI to aggregate county-wide data such as permit applications, road works, restaurant inspections, weather data, and events in the area.

The data is fed into templates in the content management system (CMS) based on neighbourhoods, which are designated via latitude and longitude marks. An editor then spends five to 10 minutes checking each newsletter and its links before sending it out to those who subscribe. Open rates are as high as 68%.

“It’s been a fantastic audience development tool in that we can offer something super unique that people just can’t find anywhere else, and thereby grow our e-mail list,” Doctor said. “And I think it’s really important that we are not using AI to replace journalists. We are using it to become faster and smarter and be able to create new products that would just be unimaginable for human staff to produce.”

Please note, Lookout Local has big newsroom teams — 19 journalists in Eugene alone — producing accountability journalism, covering all the key local issues, spending time listening to the community, running events, and so much more. The AI-aggregated newsletters are just one part of a multi-faceted service to the local community.

NTM’s automated hyper-local newsletters drive retention

Recently Jens Pettersson, head of editorial development, and Andreas Nordenhed, head of social and editorial newsletters, talked about how newsletters have become a central tool in the Swedish local media group’s retention strategy.

NTM started out with two automated newsletters of the most read articles in 2020. Now it produces 78 automated hyper-local editions (always checked by a human before sent) with more than 186,000 subscribers.

“We know the strength is in the local, so we started experimenting with newsletters focused on crime, what’s going on in the city, and even sports, because people are crazy about their local teams,” Nordenhed said. “Today we send newsletters almost every day of the week.”

The hyper-local newsletters have an average 55% open rate and 12% click-thru rate (CTR), proving their value in terms of engagement and, thereby, retention.

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