Building a pop-up evergreen newsletter

Article originally published in the RJI 2023 Winter Magazine.

This past summer, RJI Student Innovation Fellow and Missouri School of Journalism junior Sydney Lewis worked with The Times-Picayune (NOLA.com) in New Orleans to explore a new product idea: an evergreen pop-up newsletter.

Focused on hurricane preparation, the newsletter ran for six weeks and made use of content from 10 years' worth of relevant stories from the paper's digital archives, in addition to some new content that filled in the gaps.

With an eye toward innovation and efficiency, Lewis led the planning and production of the newsletter - a process that took only three weeks from idea to completion as part of an internship with the newsroom that was designed to develop news products and content strategies. She built the hurricane prep newsletter using Campaign Monitor, a design and automation tool that the Times-Picayune had previously used only to send emails, not to design and build them. The tool allowed for increased flexibility in formatting and design while staying in line with the paper's branding standards, and it was so easy to use that Lewis, who had never built a newsletter in the tool, had no issues picking it up and using it to create a refined product for the largest paper in New Orleans.

The result was a topical and timely product that delivered important service journalism to the Gulf Coast community, which has been hit by nearly 30 major hurricanes since 2000 and was wracked last year by Hurricane Ida.

"We launched the newsletter in June, and peak hurricane season doesn't start until late August or September," Lewis said. "The goal was to give people time to prepare for the season."

Fortunately, the area's hurricane season turned out to be less severe than expected, though even the quietest of hurricane seasons are rarely a breeze in New Orleans, and the area was not exempt from economic impacts stemming from Florida's deadly Hurricane Ian. But the newsletter served as an important  model for filling a need that isn't likely to go away any time soon.

Part of that importance lay in the product's quick turnaround. Because all the content was evergreen, Lewis only needed to add one or two paragraphs to introduce each edition of the newsletter while occasionally updating outdated references in the stories themselves - one article from 2013, for instance, suggested that parents bring along a portable DVD player to entertain their children during an evacuation. 

The pop-up newsletter concept can be easily adapted to suit the needs of any news organization. Types of evergreen content will vary between organizations, and staffing differences might change the ratio of new and repurposed content.

The core of the process, however — which uses Campaign Monitor and existing evergreen content to build a topical newsletter quickly and easily — has utility for newsrooms all over the country.

And while the project offered service journalism to the people of New Orleans and demonstrated another way for the industry to engage with the communities it serves, the project also meant a lot to Lewis, whose first professional newsroom internship netted her real work products thanks to the product-focused nature of RJI Student Innovation Fellowships. 

"I was working with the Times-Picayune's digital team, but I got to basically own this project myself," Lewis said. "It was amazing to be able to jump in and have that creative freedom, and now I've come out of my first internship with a pretty robust product portfolio."