How Are Journalism Schools Teaching Newsletter Skills?

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I took my first journalism course in high school in the late 1990s. While we used Macintosh Plus computers to lay out our school newspaper, our school did not have internet access, and email was still a newfangled thing.

But as the inbox has become more central to our lives, it’s also become far more important to journalists. Newsrooms rely on newsletters to distribute content and generate revenue — primarily from advertisers and paying supporters. For many publications, newsletters are a modern version of the front page, delivering the most important stories directly to readers.

And newsletters continue to grow in importance for journalism because of the rise of independent platforms. Since I started reporting this piece, there have been major announcements in newsletters and journalism. Paul Krugman left the New York Times to launch a paid newsletter product, which, based on publicly available data, is likely bringing in more than $70,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Oliver Darcy, who left CNN last summer, is reportedly on track to bring in more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue. Both Beehiiv and Substack announced resources for reporters and journalists looking to launch their newsletters.

So, in a world where indie newsletter writers can pull in five, six, or sometimes seven figures in revenue, and where long-respected traditional newspapers publish dozens of newsletters, it’s no surprise that newsletter production’s art, craft, and business have begun to play a bigger role in undergraduate journalism education. I wanted to know how journalism educators use newsletters as teaching tools, how they adhere to and diverge from the more traditional journalism school models, and what their students care about. 

How newsletters are used as teaching tools

Journalism professors use newsletters in their classrooms in various ways, from best-practice examples to actual live publications with active subscriber lists. At the New School in New York City, Blake Eskin teaches a course called Starting an Email Newsletter, where he uses newsletters to teach students about different parts of the journalism business. As newsletter publishers, students learn multiple roles at once, from editorial to art to layout. “Because we’re teaching people to be journalists in the 21st century, that can be everything from thinking about the audience, thinking about the product, being visual, and being where people are. Where’s your audience, who’s your audience?” he said. “I think doing a newsletter is a way to practice a lot of different skills and be introduced to a different mindset about what a journalist is.”

He starts his course by asking students to brainstorm examples of newsletters they like and hate getting and why they feel that way about each. They dissect issues from sources like the New York Times, theSkimm, and Refinery29. He brings in newsletter writers, including Alicia Kennedy, Helen Fitzgerald, and Emily Nunn, as guest speakers. He also has his students write various examples of newsletters based on prompts, like showing readers the farewell posts from sites like Rookie and encouraging them to emulate the format.

At the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill’s College of Journalism, Stacey Decker directs Capital News Service (CNS), a student-operated newswire that operates across many platforms, including a weekly newsletter. CNS covers news of interest to all Marylanders, not just the university, and maintains offices and news teams in Annapolis, Baltimore, College Park, and Washington, D.C. 

Even 10 or 15 years ago, most journalism schools divided students into specific tracks based on whether they wanted to go into fields like print or broadcast journalism. That’s no longer the case at schools like Maryland, with newsletters reflecting just part of that sea change. “It’s clear to me that newsletters are important product for news organizations,” she said, “and that if students want to go into digital roles in news when they leave here, it’s important for them to have some experience with newsletters and have a deeper understanding of how valuable they are to news organizations in terms of finding audience, engaging audience, and eventually converting audience.”

To help students learn more about newsletters, every week, one student is assigned the role of CNS newsletter editor, responsible for deciding what stories will go into the email. After each issue is scheduled and sent out, the students review its stats. Decker said that when evaluating whether each issue is successful, she has the students ensure that it is something that people can easily read or scan, acquire the information they need, and “go away feeling they had a good experience with our brand.”

Jeremy Caplan teaches at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, which has programs in entrepreneurial and engagement journalism. (He also writes the newsletter Wonder Tools.) Caplan and his students discuss newsletter strategy, including the practical aspects of launching. “It’s important to understand which platforms allow you to do which kinds of things, which revenue streams make sense for which kinds of newsletters, which audience growth tactics make sense depending on your subject matter, and your budget and your capabilities and your preferences,” he said. 

What’s changing at journalism schools

There are basic skills just about any journalist is expected to master at some point if they want to make a career in it. These include writing a compelling lede, knowing how to conduct an interview, self-editing, and working with an editor. (Also: Understanding why “lede” is spelled that way.)

And yet, there are plenty of old rules in journalism that no longer hold true. Journalists were once taught that you could work on a publication’s editorial or marketing side, but you certainly couldn’t do both — combining the two was like crossing the streams in “Ghostbusters.” But in 2025, anyone running a newsletter needs to be able to do both. I simultaneously run the editorial strategy for my newsletter, Evil Witches, while handling the marketing for my paid subscriptions.

Caplan said he emphasizes his classes by looking at these changes in the media ecosystem — how it’s expanded and contracted over the years — and the role of newsletters in that. “We talk about newsletters as a vehicle to reach people and have a more direct connection to our audiences,” he said, “because people are not consuming traditional media in the same way they did in generations past.” Just a few years ago, he said, creating a newsletter might have been seen as a “kind of curiosity,” but now serious journalists can have a career entirely based around newsletters.

His students at CUNY review how traditional news orgs like the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal use newsletters in creative ways, how publications like Semafor and Axios are built around a newsletter strategy, and how organizations like the Marshall Project can use newsletters to both distribute content via both ongoing and short-run newsletters. He also encourages students to think carefully about the business models behind these publications — from direct revenue (subscriptions or donations) to advertising to nontraditional channels (selling merch or tickets). “Increasingly a lot of us are questioning that and rethinking that,” he said.

These changes also mean journalism professors need to discuss post-graduate career paths differently. The 20th-century journalism career often looked like a baseball career — you’d start in the minor leagues, often in some small town, and then work your way up to bigger and bigger cities. “I don’t think that’s what is true anymore,” Eskin told me. It’s not easy to find an entry-level newsroom job — local or otherwise — that can pay a living wage. Newsletters are inexpensive to launch, and some students may choose to bypass traditional outlets to build their own media outlets, which can actually turn a profit.

But whether they choose to work within a legacy publication or strike out on their own, these students need to learn how to engage directly with their audience.

“Students are already thinking in terms of which community they would like to or see a need to serve, what are the communities’ needs and issues and opportunities, and what kinds of products and tactics will be most relevant and resonate,” said Caplan. “It’s also hard-nosed product thinking — what kinds of newsletters might work, what kinds of podcasts, what kinds of distribution channels, what kinds of revenues streams might emerge from those kinds of relationships.”

Accordingly, students learn much earlier than some old-timers did how to measure their publication’s success, including click rates, social media engagement, and unsubscribe numbers. “We have a heat map we can look at. That will sometimes get us to come up with creative ideas for how to get people to engage after they open,” Decker said. “This semester, we added a special promo to our election coverage in the newsletter. We see that people who open our newsletters tend to click on the links that we have at the top. We briefly link to them before we get into the meat of the stories. We try and do a good job of finessing that language to make it actionable for people.” It’s an example of how, as Decker put it, “technologies have influenced the ways organizations put out news.”

Perhaps no change has been as great as those happening on the business side of the journalism world. Once upon a time, editorial lived in one silo, and advertising or marketing lived in another. As a writer and reporter, I never had to learn how to get advertisers, how much to charge for an ad, or how to figure out how to get people to pay to support the publication I was writing for.

But now, many in the journalism world handle editorial, marketing, and sales on a daily basis, and journalism students who study newsletters need to learn those skills, too. Caplan asks students to share what they read, what makes them successful or not in their eyes, and then what those newsletters do from a marketing and revenue perspective “because students sometimes haven’t thought about that aspect of things.”

Eskin gives his students a prompt in their newsletter class called “Put An Ad In It.” He explained: “Some of them will do a text ad, and some will do a display ad, and it forces questions about, ’How is this?’ And then some of them will do something that’s more sponsored content. And then we’re like, ’Well, how is this different than your editorial voice?’” There isn’t just one way to incorporate advertising into a newsletter, but Eskin said the prompt forces students to make intentional choices about how they build ads into their products.

What traditional journalism skills still matter to a newsletter operator?

While journalism may look different from the movies “His Girl Friday,” “All The President’s Men,” or even, by this point, “Spotlight,” there are still skills that anyone — not just a journalism student — needs to learn to make a great newsletter.

Quality, accurate reporting

I rely a lot on anonymous sources for my newsletter, Evil Witches, but if an editor knocked on my door and demanded proof that real people said what I said they said, I could back it up. That’s the old-school journalism training in me. Eskin said his students are “thinking about sourcing, thinking about verification, thinking about who’s involved in the story and how they matter.”

Decker said that students join CNS staff after receiving background education in traditional reporting, media literacy, ethics, and law, including the importance of impartiality. “They are conscious of producing content that does not indicate that you have a bias,” she said. “If you’re shortening a story to go in a newsletter, you don’t want to remove the attribution of a data point or a quote. You want to make sure you have some perspective from both sides of an issue, even though you’re only including a few paragraphs of the story.” 

Clean, clear, consistent writing

Many newsletters are written by a specific writer with a byline attached. Those writers have choices to make about the voice they use in the newsletter — Do you want something that feels more professional, or are you trying to sound more like a trusted friend? — but at the end of the day, the tone usually mirrors how the writer writes and talks.

Unlike some writer-driven newsletters, CNS newsletters do not have a byline, but Decker said they still need to have a clear voice — it needs to be clear that someone took the time to curate and write that edition. “I do encourage them, in the newsletter, to use plain language.” Each newsletter begins with “Good morning, readers,” she said, adding her students “always want to throw an exclamation point in there, and I always take it out,” which she said gives them a gentle lesson in professional writing style.

Writing great subject lines

Email subject lines are a different beast than print headlines, which are constrained by literal space. But they’re also unusually important. In print, a reader might see a photo or a graphic that catches their eye and convinces them to read the story. In the inbox, a reader only sees who the email is from and the subject line.

To ensure they’re writing good subject lines, Decker’s students write a few options for each issue and then vote via Slack to pick their favorite option.

But while newsletter subject lines can play with emojis, jokes, and other non-traditional forms, Decker observed a journey from traditional newspaper headlines to subject lines designed to catch a reader’s eye. “I see more acceptance of and embracing of headlines that are grabbing and enticing, the key being that they have to deliver,” she said. “If you put out a headline or a subject line, and somebody opens that newsletter and it doesn’t deliver on the subject line, then you’ve done a disservice for your brand.”

Remember that in the inbox, you need to stand out — and writing a good subject line is crucial in getting your news or content out to your reader. “People are busy, people are scanning, people are scrolling,” she said, “so pulling them in with an enticing headline is still doing quality journalism.”

Proofreading matters — there isn’t an “undo” button

Eskin points out that with newsletters, “Once you send it, it’s out there, as opposed to having a website where you can make updates or delete things. There’s always a small risk when you’re doing something in public of doing something embarrassing and other people noticing.” 

Everyone makes mistakes —that’s why newspapers run corrections. Students need to make mistakes to learn from them. But staying organized, being accurate and having a system for catching errors before they go out in the world is a great way to avoid retracting or apologizing for your work. (We’ve got a few suggestions if you do need to send an apology.) 

Getting to the point

In traditional journalism, you learn the inverted pyramid style, where the most important information lives at the top of the story and the more trimmable details come later. With newsletters, you have more room to experiment with this style, but still, you don’t have much time to waste. 

In the inbox, you’re always competing with other emails — not to mention anything else that might be coming across your screen. That means you don’t have time to waste in a newsletter. “I think it’s attention to detail, consistency, being clear, being concise,” Eskin said. Most news newsletters need to get to the point — otherwise, readers may click elsewhere.

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