How the 1/5/10 Strategy Can Improve Your Daily Newsletter

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There are a lot of daily newsletters out there, and many use the same premise to entice new subscribers: our newsletter will get you up to speed in five minutes or less. There’s Morning Brew (“Become smarter in just 5 minutes”), Roca News (“What you need—and want—to know each day, in 5 min or less”), TLDR (“Keep up with tech in 5 minutes”), and even newsletters that skip the tagline and put the read time right there in the newsletter’s name (the Washington Post’s 5-Minute Fix).

But some of my favorite daily newsletters aren’t just five-minute reads. They could also be read in one minute or ten minutes.

How could one newsletter be read at three very different speeds? There’s no podcast-like hack where you can make a reader scroll at 1.5x speed. The trick is all in how you structure the newsletter using what I call the “1/5/10 strategy.”

What’s behind the 1/5/10 strategy

There’s a concept in the journalism world known as “the inverted pyramid.” The idea dates back to the early days of print newspapers. Imagine being the designer of the newspaper. It’s late; you have one last page to finish before sending the paper to the printer. You’re trying to figure out how to squeeze 1,000 words into a space that can only hold 750. How would you decide which parts of the story to run and which to cut?

With the inverted pyramid, the most important details were in the top paragraph, the second-most important details in the next paragraph, and so on. By the end of the story were the details that are easiest to cut — if you needed to eliminate something, you’d start with the last paragraph and start cutting until you got the story to fit in the space allotted. If you needed to cut everything but the first paragraph, that would still be OK. You’d only be printing a few sentences, but those would be the most important sentences of the entire story. 

The strategy was also helpful for busy readers who could skim the headlines for the top news, get more information from the subhead, and read the entire article for all the details. 

Think of the 1/5/10 strategy as the newsletter version of the inverted pyramid. Newsletters that use the strategy know that readers are busy and don’t have a lot of time to read your newsletter, but things might vary from day to day. One day, they might only have a minute to read. The next day, they might have five or ten.

Hence, the 1/5/10 strategy allows you to build a newsletter that can be read in one, five, or ten minutes, depending on the time a reader has and their interest in the topic. If you’ve only got a minute to read, that’s OK — the newsletter is built so that you can still get value from that email, even though you’re not reading the whole thing.

If you have one minute to read…

The “1” part of the newsletter isn’t just an intro. The goal is to put something of value right at the start — something that, if a reader were to stop reading after a minute, would have made that newsletter worth reading.

I’ve written before about the “job” of your newsletter. With an intro, the job should be super clear — and pretty short since a reader has about a minute to read it. 

Take this fantasy football newsletter from Yahoo Sports. Their “1” lists fantasy headlines about injuries and news that might affect your fantasy team. This section aims to inform readers of what’s happening across the National Football League, and if they spend a minute reading it, they might immediately have something to do. (In my case, I read this and realized I needed to pick up a new quarterback to replace the injured Dak Prescott on my fantasy team.) There’s a lot more in the newsletter, but if you stopped here, you still got a lot out of this email.

Here’s a very different example from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They use the first section of their newsletter — many newsrooms refer to this section as a “topper” or “top note” — to highlight the day’s main story and what it means for readers. But they’ve got flexibility with that space, too. I particularly liked this Election Day edition, where the AJC’s Tyler Estep shared a story about voting and then used that to highlight stories about poll workers. Again, there’s a lot more below, but it would still be an interesting read if this was the entire newsletter.

Or here’s Matthew Belloni’s newsletter for Puck, where he writes about Hollywood. Belloni goes into a huge story later in his email but uses that top section to empty his notebook with reporting about the week’s big entertainment stories. The juiciest nuggets and scoops are often right there within the first 60 seconds of reading.

If you have five minutes to read…

This is where newsletters that want to go deeper on a topic can do so. You’ve still got a reader’s attention, so what do you want to give them to keep them reading?

Take the 19th, a newsroom that covers gender, politics, and policy. With their top note, they highlight a few stories you need to be aware of. Then, in the middle section of the newsletter, they highlight a featured story of the day. In their case, they usually link out so readers can continue to read on their website.

Meanwhile, other newsletters keep the entire contents of the “5” section within the inbox. A good example of that comes from the Dispatch, which starts with a few quick hits about politics — they call the section “Up to Speed” — and follows that with a deep dive into one big story in the middle of their email. The example below featured a reported campaign trail piece running over 800 words. (That should take someone about three to four minutes to read. There’s no great tool to measure in-email reading, but I like to use Hemingway, a free online editor, to estimate read time.)

(A bit of transparency: Several orgs mentioned in this piece, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Dispatch, are longtime Inbox Collective clients.)

If you have ten minutes to read…

Lastly, there’s the “10” part of the strategy. What happens if you’ve given subscribers the quick read and you’ve given them the deeper dive? 

You could still give the reader a little bit more.

I really like how St. Louis Magazine does this in their daily newsletter. They have a note at the top, then a deep dive, and then a few short features towards the bottom of the newsletter in a section they call “Around Town.” It’s reminiscent of what a magazine editor would call the “front of book” part of the magazine — the quick features and brief notes you get when you first open the magazine before you’ve gotten to the cover stories. (Except in this case, it happens to be at the end of the newsletter.) 

Take the example below. It’s a brief feature about a couple that painted a new mural in St. Louis. This isn’t strong enough content to lead the newsletter, but it still has a place for readers with a bit more time to read.

Something else I love: As you scroll through the newsletter, this section looks so different from others. The change in design catches your eye and makes you pay attention.

A newsletter like Hey Salt Lake from City Cast uses its “10” section to highlight event listings around town. The content provides clear value — plenty of readers are looking for stuff to do at different price points — but is also slotted into exactly the right place in the newsletter. As a bonus, many readers might keep scrolling to the bottom, looking for that section, which means they might stumble upon other stories along the way.

I love how WBUR does this with their newsletter, too. Every edition closes with one link to something trending on social media in Boston, where WBUR is based. They don’t give you too much information before you click — they tease the story and leave you guessing what’s behind the link.

(In the example below, the tease linked to a TikTok video of members of the Boston Celtics practicing their speed walking.)

Even though it’s buried all the way at the bottom of the newsletter, readers will often scroll to the bottom to click. Why? They know there will be a little treat for them, and they’ve built the habit of checking to see what it might be.

This sort of section is what news editors often refer to as a “kicker.” It’s the newsletter equivalent of when you’re watching the local news, and the anchors show a 30-second video of a waterskiing squirrel just before the show ends. Or I’ll use the movie analogy: It’s when the superhero movie throws a sneak preview of the next movie into the credits, and you hang around to make sure you don’t miss it. Is that sneak peek or waterskiing squirrel the most important thing you just watched? No. But sometimes, it’s nice when you get a little surprise like that for sticking around. The same thing is true for the “10” section.

What if the 1/5/10 format isn’t for me?

If you look through your inbox, you’ll see plenty of newsletters that don’t use the 1/5/10 strategy. A brand like Axios, for instance, builds its newsletters around the concept of “smart brevity” — you’ll learn a lot in just a few minutes, no more, no less. The design choices they’ve made, to me, suggest that they intend for you to make it all the way through the email.

Other newsletters go much longer than 10 minutes — Tangle, for instance, is a newsletter that often takes 15 minutes or more to read.

I’m less concerned about the length of an email for someone who sends weekly or monthly. Many personality-driven indie newsletters are built around long essays or conversations. There’s no quick version of the newsletter. Either you read the entire thing, start to finish, or you don’t. Forget the inverted pyramid; you may read the first few sentences of an issue and have no idea where it will end unless you read the whole thing.

So as I mentioned earlier, I think the 1/5/10 strategy makes the most sense for daily newsletters, since those require a larger commitment over a week. Sure, building a daily email that’s a 15-minute read is great if you’ve got the time — most newsletter operators would love to have a large, loyal audience that always makes space for what they have to say — but what if those readers usually don’t have the time? You might accidentally be training readers to ignore your content. A reader might see your name in the inbox and automatically think, “I don’t have time for that right now.” Your newsletter might become synonymous with “too long; didn’t read.”

With the 1/5/10 strategy, you train readers to understand that they don’t need a ton of time to get something out of your newsletter. Even if they only have a minute, they’ll find something useful in your newsletter.

And then the next time you send an email? They got something of value the day before, so they’ll be more likely to come back, open your newsletter again, and read just a little bit more.

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