The case for the email newsletter

Assuming the majority of your life has fallen between the years 1990 and 2022, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you read most of your news online: unless you’re a Mennonite, a newspaper purist, some sort of masochist that enjoys greatly inconveniencing yourself — and/or my journalism professor. Whatever the case, you do you. 

A 2021 Pew Research Center poll found that of the overwhelming majority of Americans who get their news online, most directly visit websites or apps to read their media. The one exception was the 18-29-year-old age group, which reported more often getting news from social media.

But newsletters have four big advantages over social media and aggregate services like Google News or Apple News, or just checking a newspaper’s website:

(1) The newsletter is a finite experience; there’s a set start and end point, which means you don’t get sucked into endlessly scrolling through an app. 

(2) It’s a lot easier to set a routine around reading newsletters. You might read a morning newsletter at breakfast, then an evening newsletter as you get ready for bed. There’s no pressure to keep checking the news all day, so long as you commit to receiving your news almost entirely from those emails.

(3) A team of journalists selects the stories you read, not the whims of some social media algorithm that’ll keep you in a bubble.

(4) You see the day’s stories in context, side-by-side with other headlines; a newsletter is a sort of time capsule of the period it covers.

This is where the Mennonites say, “Why not just read a print paper? Wouldn’t that solve all those problems?” To which I reply: Broadsheet newspapers are a pain in the ass. They’re massive, the text is tiny, the ink smears, it’s awkward to turn the pages, so on and so forth. Newsletters marry most everything good about broadsheets, with the added bonus of actually being convenient. 

So let’s say you’re starting from scratch: You have no newspaper subscriptions, aren’t signed up for any newsletters and maybe don’t even read the news that often. Where should you look?

Start with the basics. At a bare minimum, you should subscribe to a major national newspaper with a large circulation — think The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. 

Those are generally considered the American newspapers of record, but depending on who you ask, the Los Angeles Times might also fall in that category. If you’re a USC student, you should be able to get free subscriptions to all of those but the Post.

If you really don’t want to spend money on a subscription, you could read exclusively from wire services like the Associated Press or Reuters which don’t have paywalls on their websites, but you’re likely going to miss out on original investigative journalism. New digital publications like Axios or Semafor are a good option too.

Once you have that covered, look for a local paper. The Los Angeles Times does a good job of coverage in the L.A. area, but if you want a more hyper-local look, consider subscribing to Los Angeles Daily News, which will give you access to journalism across the Southern California News Group. Maybe you’ll want to subscribe to your hometown paper, or also consider subscribing to magazines or the foreign press.

You’ve also probably heard time and time again that it’s important to get your news from a range of sources, so you can have a diverse view of the world. Honestly, I think if you want to have any view of the world in the first place, it’s more important to subscribe to papers that cover the news at different scales (national, state, local, etc.) than at different viewpoints (liberal, conservative, etc.).

If you’re never going to touch the opinion sections, the hard news reporting in the major national papers will give you more or less the same stories.

When choosing your subscriptions, consider checking out the suite of newsletters that each offers — if there’s a newsletter whose format or writing you particularly like, subscribe to that paper so you can read the stories that the emails link to. Also consider that it’s important you don’t inundate yourself with so much media that you never read any of it.

Another option is to read a third-party newsletter like Morning Brew, a “daily email newsletter covering the latest news from Wall St. to Silicon Valley,” or one that I write called Morning, Trojan, where I summarize and link to campus stories from the Daily Trojan and Annenberg Media, alongside L.A. County and state news from professional outlets. 

I should probably confess that as part of my job writing Morning, Trojan, I do a deep dive through dozens of websites and social media accounts every night to find the best stories, so a good chunk of my news isn’t coming from newsletters — but if I was only reading for myself, it would. 

And a quick bonus tip: I don’t have any newspaper apps downloaded on my phone. When I see a story I find interesting in a newsletter, I add it to my Safari reading list. That means there’s one place I can go to on multiple devices to see all my saved stories across all my subscriptions, rather than having to open each website or app individually.

It’s totally possible that your news-reading routine will look similar to mine, and it’s also totally possible that what I do just won’t work for you. All that matters is that you work out a solution that’s going to tread the fine line between keeping you informed and sane — and that line’s going to be different for everyone.