IDS to pilot daily e-newsletter with Media School students
The Indiana Daily Student is working with The Media School to pilot a daily e-newsletter as part of its transition to an increased online presence.
With its 150th anniversary celebration just around the corner, the IDS has been making some big changes. This fall, the newspaper cut back to publishing a print edition two days a week and began focusing more on its digital platform. Now, it’s getting ready to produce a daily e-newsletter that is set to roll out by the end of the semester, replacing its current newsletter that only comes out once a week. All Media School students will automatically receive this letter in their inbox once it launches.
“This could supplement the other days that the newspaper isn’t printed,” said editor-in-chief Jamie Zega, a senior majoring in journalism. “The change is new for everybody, which is causing us to think outside the box a bit.”
In preparation for the rollout of the new daily email, the IDS is working with The Media School to automatically subscribe all of its students to the e-newsletter. If this proves to be successful, the IDS hopes to replicate this model with the entire IU student body. This could potentially get the publication thousands more eyeballs on its website and social media accounts.
This would improve an already strong web presence. According to Greg Menkedick, director of creative marketing and operations, the IDS’s weekly newsletter has 11,000 subscribers, 40 percent of whom open the content when it appears in their inbox.
“Those numbers are well above industry standards,” said Menkedick. “We take a lot of pride in our click rate.”
The IDS also has more than 37,000 followers on Twitter and more than 13,000 Facebook likes.
Menkedick said that with access to a students’ email addresses, the IDS can glean other information, such as their year in school and their major. This allows the IDS to keep track of its readership and, eventually, even customize the content on its newsletters to appeal to specific readers.
Subscribers will have a certain level of autonomy, too, Menkedick said. The IDS hopes to implement a way for readers to tailor what types of information comes in their daily newsletter. And students can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.
This isn’t the IDS’s only major digital initiative underway. In addition to giving the website a facelift (which is scheduled to be complete in the next month), the staff has been using new storytelling platforms, including web photo galleries and Snapchat stories. All of this, Zega said, is a way for the IDS to “reach readers where they are.”
Meanwhile, the recent reduction in print schedule and increased emphasis on the web product means readers can expect to see fewer breaking stories in their paper copies of the IDS and more narrative pieces with a longer shelf life.
Despite all of these changes, though, there is still a loyalty to what the paper was intended to be 150 years ago. But the IDS has become more than a newspaper.
“We don’t want to be thought of as just a newspaper anymore,” said Menkedick. “We want to be thought of as a media organization.”
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