Headquartered in London, Reach PLC is the UK and Ireland’s largest commercial news publisher, with 130+ print and online brands, including the Daily Mirror, Daily Record, and Daily Star. Publications cover regional and national news, sports, and entertainment, with 12.3 million registered users and a monthly audience of 47 million.

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted lives around the world, Reach saw a significant increase in demand for local news. “In a time of crisis, people turn to brands they trust to get information,” says Reach PLC’s Audience Transformation Director Martin Little. “People were locked to their devices, which meant our digital brands were even more relevant to them.”

To build on that demand, Reach partnered with the Google News Initiative (GNI), Little says, “to continue to find new ways to build relationships with readers.”

From 2021 to 2022, the Reach team engaged in trainings via the Google News Lab and the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) – hoping to engage audiences hungry for local coverage. Newsletters, they realized, were an untapped source of greater audience engagement.

“Content is a dynamic beast,” Little says. “It’s constantly moving. Demands are moving. Delivery methods are moving. We had newsletters in our titles, but they weren’t loved and cared for, and we weren’t getting the best we could out of them.” Newsrooms viewed them more as gateways to click through to publication websites – not as news products in and of themselves.

“We had a lot of newsletters just focused on distributing content,” Little explains. “We wanted to make the newsletter a destination for people to consume in their inboxes. We ended up trying a lot of different routes to market and propositions to see what would cut through.”

Project Stamp launched its first newsletter in February 2022 with the Manchester Evening News called The Mancunian Way — “a daily digest of news, views and opinions” named for the city’s elevated “highway in the sky.” Several other specialty newsletters launched across Reach UK publications during 2022.

The newsletters include long-form features, such as an interview with a Holocaust survivor and a story about a British man who went missing in Ukraine. Reach is also creating content focused on under-represented communities: For example, the LancsLive newsletter, MyBlackburn, covers topics important to Lancashire’s multicultural communities, such as this story on Islamophobia.

“Newsletters written by the same author each edition tend to retain subscribers,” says Reach PLC’s Digital Innovations Editor Paul Gallagher. “We promote the authors using bylines and images prominently.”

Six months after launch, Project Stamp newsletters saw open rates on popular issues often exceeding 50 or 60 percent. In total, Reach publication newsletters grew from 1.8 million subscribers before Project Stamp to 4.5 million subscribers at the end of 2023.

“Our newsletter page views have grown from 400,000 to up to 2 million a day,” Little says. “We get a lot more page views from newsletters than any other publisher I'm aware of in the UK.”