What’s a powerful way to get newsrooms to drive subscriptions? Listen to your audience, provide high-quality journalism, and build a community, says the team at The Boston Globe. 

“Live blogs are really just giving people what they want,” Globe Deputy Managing Editor Heather Ciras told attendees at the recent INMA Subscriptions Media Summit. Her team runs The Globe’s digital homepage and handles all breaking news. 

In 2025, they decided to run more than 200 live blogs: “We have had a live blog on the site every single weekday since (the January 2025 presidential) inauguration. We are very tired, but it’s been a massive boon for us.

“We had over six million pageviews to live blogs in 2025, and we had a lot of conversions,” she said. 

The Globe is known for its incredibly tight paywall, with readers being asked to pay after one article.

A homepage editor runs the blog, which is placed at the top of the homepage, Ciras said.

“We did have to do about seven million conversations in the newsroom about why we were doing this, why it was at the top of the homepage, why if there’s breaking news in our market, we needed to really jump on it and own it there instead of just starting to write a main bar like our instincts are telling us after 100 years.”

The Globe also decided to invest in newsletters. 

“We all know that the inbox is trusted. When people sign up for a newsletter, they’re welcoming you into their inbox, and you have to be really good to be there. And in fact, I think that that’s really the core of what we’re talking about — making sure that the journalism is incredibly good so people want to pay for it, and getting it out in front of as many people as you possibly can,” Ciras said.

The Globe launched its daily flagship newsletter, Starting Point, at the end of 2024. 

“We increased 8% top-of-the-funnel newsletter traffic year over year — in part because of this, with another suite of newsletters that we have — really just listening to what people want,” Ciras said.

“They’re engaging with it. If they e-mail us and say something, we e-mail them back. And we’ve been experimenting with pop-up newsletters. It’s not something you have to do for the rest of your life; it’s just something that you have to do for a couple of weeks. And it’s been a lot of fun actually. It’s like a new way of thinking about things.”

Ciras works closely with Chief Marketing and Strategic Initiatives Officer Michelle Micone, who said an important strategy was to help subscribers feel like they are part of a community.

“Community is a subscription benefit, a subscription layer, and we are offering up that community to our subscribers so we can keep them and really make them feel part of something,” Micone told conference attendees.

Newsrooms have to be ready to move quickly, Ciras said.

“I’ve been at The Globe for almost 15 years, and the only consistent thing is change. It makes our teams nimble and scrappy,” she said “And I tell my team all the time that we have to think of ourselves as like a pirate ship, where we’re trying to push the boundaries of what journalism looks like and how people encounter it, and think about how to reach them natively in so many different ways.”

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Banner art: Adobe Stock By Mojahid Mottakin.

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