top of page
Radio show microphones

Wonks and War Rooms

clipart1711928.png
RSS Feed Icon_White
Spotify Icon_White
Google Podcasts icon_White.png
Nov 13

Newsletters in a High-Choice Media Environment with Nick Taylor-Vaisey

In this episode Elizabeth talks to Nick Taylor-Vaisey, a journalist for Politico who works on the Ottawa Playbook, a free daily morning newsletter decoding Canadian politics. Nick and Elizabeth discuss the role of newsletters in curating information in a high-choice media environment and the way journalism has adapted to becoming digital. They discuss newsletters as a form of political information sharing and how this type of media can facilitate a direct relationship between author and reader. Elizabeth and Nick close out the show by chatting about the different reasons that individuals might subscribe to a political newsletter,  the role of news aggregators in curating information, and what it's like to work in the Ottawa “fishbowl”.


Additional Resources:


Contributors

Host: Elizabeth Dubois

Research Lead: Mykenzie Barrera

Transcript: Michelle Rodrigues 

Audio Editing: Ayman Naciri

Translation: Els Thant & Helena Legault

Publishing and Promotion: Helena Legault 

Producer: Michelle Hennessey

 

Episode Transcript: Newsletters in a High-Choice Media Environment

Read the transcript below or download a copy in the language of your choice:



Elizabeth: [00:00:04] Welcome to Wonks and War Rooms where political communication theory meets on the ground strategy. I'm your host, Elizabeth Dubois. I'm an Associate Professor and University research chair in politics, communication and technology at the University of Ottawa. My pronouns are she/her. Today I'm chatting with Nick Taylor-Vaisey about newsletters and their role in our high choice and hybrid media environment. Nick, take it away.


Nick: [00:00:27] Sure. My name is Nick Taylor-Vaisey. I work at Politico in Ottawa. I've been there for 3 years, and a little bit before that, I was at Macleans magazine, and I worked in Ottawa and Toronto for parts of those years. And a few years before that, I was at the University of Ottawa, where I met most of my still current close friends at The Fulcrum, at the student paper on King Edward Avenue. Same building now, I think. That's where I learned everything about how to be a journalist. And it's been more than 15 years now, and that's a funny thing to think about, especially since those Covid years kind of collapsed and expanded time simultaneously.


Nick: [00:01:02] I don't really know what 15 years is supposed to feel like, but each step along the way has been some kind of exposure to the kind of emerging and collapsing trends in journalism [To learn more on past and current trends in journalism consult: The Rise of Digital Journalism: Past, Present, and Future], from working at a print newspaper where we printed The Fulcrum. I understand that is no longer the case. To experimenting with audience engagement going really, really big on video for a few years there. And now I work at a place where my primary consideration is writing a morning newsletter for political people, [but] not exclusively [for political people] because we want regular people to be able to understand what's going on in and around Parliament Hill [note: Nick is referring to the Ottawa Playbook a free daily morning newsletter decoding Canadian politics, published by Politico]. But mostly our core audience is the connected people who live and breathe on this stuff. I don't know what the funnest job I ever had was. I still think it might be Sports Editor at The Fulcrum. That was a blast. And I mean man, what a time. But this comes pretty close because this is sport in its own way, but arguably much more consequential than the Gee-Gees football score [note: the Gee-Gees are the athletic teams that represent the University of Ottawa].


Elizabeth: [00:01:59] That kind of history that you've had through these different media really is indicative of what our media environment has looked like. You have kind of worked through that progression as a whole lot more choice has been added to our media environment. So, we talk in my political communication classes about this idea of a high choice media environment, and we actually did a Wonks and War Rooms episode back in season one with Jane Lytvynenko on the high choice media environment [consult our previous episode: The High-Choice Media Environment with Jane Lytvynenko]. And it's in this idea that there's just like way more sources and channels of communication for people when they're trying to get political information or news than there ever used to be. And that changes the game in terms of how you reach people and how people figure out what they need to figure out when they're going to go and decide to vote or not.


Nick: [00:02:46] It also changes things for us too, right? [For more background information consult: Journalism in the Age of Twitter], Because we are new consumers at an intense level. My attention span has absolutely shrunk in 15 years and is ever shrinking. There's just so much that is constantly distracting because so many people keep reporting such interesting stories all over the world. But even just in the space of Parliament Hill and the precinct up there. So it impacts how we reach people, but also how information reaches us, and it forces us to really be quite efficient with our time, which of course, very few journalists are.


Elizabeth: [00:03:15] Trying to be efficient with your time when you have so many different things to keep track of is really difficult. So that's one of the things I want to get into today. I want to talk about the different kinds of forms we have for news and political information and the formats that it comes in. So you mentioned print and there's online versions of print, but then there's these new approaches like a newsletter style. There's also tons of podcasts that have cropped up from the mainstream outlets, niche outlets, and then from people who aren't necessarily trained journalists. And we've got YouTubers and TikTokers and just so much in this space. So let's try and pick that apart. What are the main kinds of formats that impact you in your political life?


Nick: [00:04:08] Well, I guess it depends if we're talking about what I'm putting into the world or what I'm consuming, but I think it's kind of an interesting answer. If I think about it and talk about what I put into the world, because I've kind of reached this point where even though I'm part of what is ostensibly new media like newsletters are this new and emerging thing. Just like podcasts, newsletters are as old as the internet. I remember in the late 90s there were newsletters that would be consumed by email. So it's an old thing that we are constantly trying to reinvent or keep fresh [for some background on the history of the newsletter, consult: The Newsletter Boom, 300 Years before Substack].


Nick: [00:04:41] But what it has changed in my brain is everything about the 2010s. There were so many places we can put information where people will see it for the first time, and we will be able to take credit for it as journalists who constantly want scoops. So you're the first person to say something on Twitter [note: Twitter is now known as X]. Oh man, what a bonanza. All the retweets, all the clout [note: “clout” is slang referring to fame or popularity]. And of course, that still exists. But the newsletter goes out everyday. The one I write at 6 a.m. And now my brain thinks of it as a newspaper because I just don't want to tweet anymore. I don't want to be in that rat race [note: “rat race” refers to a way of life in severe competition], that kind of race to the bottom of how fast and how engaged everything can be at all time[s]. That is a life I think many of us have lived and still need to live at certain points, like on really big news days, but mostly I just want to retreat to this world where I don't have to worry about that. And whatever 6 a.m. brings to the people who read my newsletter, that's what I can give them.


Nick: [00:05:34] But that is actually a really old-fashioned way to think about journalism now, because it's kind of like how the newspaper would come to the stoop and you'd pick it up, and that's what you read that day. And then your competitors would read what you wrote and then maybe have to match it or whatever, but weren't really sure what you had until you just saw the next day, what in fact was there. I'm not naive, and I don't think that this is the only way, but I really do like the relationship that it builds with readers who know that every morning they can come and see this thing, and it's kind of like everything I learned, or my colleagues who also write it, everything we learned the day before that's useful is what they get right now. 6 a.m...


Elizabeth: [00:06:08] What's interesting to me is, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels to me like the newsletter form leans into this idea of, we're going to curate information for you, and we're going to digest it a little bit for you, rather than we're simply going to report on what's there. And I'm not suggesting that newspapers didn't digest or curate in the past, but it seems the idea of subscribing to a newsletter or saying, yep, I want that in my inbox everyday at 6 a.m. people tend to be doing that these days with the idea of, I want this particular perspective on what just happened. I want this person's view of how it should be curated, versus in a broadcast era it was ‘you had a newspaper and if you wanted to know what was going on, that's what was going to be delivered to your doorstep’.


Nick: [00:06:55] And also what happens next? That's important for us. If we're just describing what happened yesterday, most people are consuming news in so many ways that they don't need to know what just happened, but they might need a take on why it was important that they're not going to get anywhere else. An unpacking of it with people who remove themselves from the news and just talk about the thing, and then also about what's next. 6 a.m. is a start point for peoples' days, it's not an end point on yesterday. And so that's really important for us to do. And you can do it in a way that is not reported. Like you say, it's clear that it's from a reporter, but it's not an opinion columnist. This is not an op-ed. It's this space between where no one would mistake us for having opinions, definitive opinions anyway.


Nick: [00:07:35] We might poke someone in a way where we're having a little fun with them. But mostly it's analysis. But it's analysis with humour, with a voice, and with hopefully some authoritative reasoning. That's a really useful way to help people start their day on Parliament Hill, where when the House [of Commons] and the Senate are sitting there's so much happening all the time. It can feel like a bit of a tornado. So we are strategic in what we write about, but we cover as much ground as we can and then we move on to the next day.


Elizabeth: [00:08:00] Absolutely. It reminds me of my time back working for a Member of Parliament on the Hill [note, “the Hill” is slang for Parliament Hill in Canada’s Capital Region], and we would start our day with actual news clippings, like there's the compendium of all of the important news clippings, and we would go through it. That was not a particularly helpful way to actually get through all of the news coverage of the previous day because it didn't give that context of what's coming next or this compiling that newsletters like your own, but many other newsletters also do. They offer a bit of perspective in the process.


Nick: [00:08:36] Quorum still exists too [note: Quorum is a daily news compilation resource for Parliamentarians, it is only available to parliamentary staff]. They still put that out - the diligent people at the Library of Parliament. And it's hugely useful if you need to check back on something or if you want to scroll through really quickly on the digital version and maybe you're looking for a columnist in particular who you know writes that day, and this is the place where you can find that information. But it's a pile of information.


Nick: [00:08:56] I'm sure we could rewind 20 years and more people everyday would be reading so much more of Quorum, but now we just feel at least like we don't have the time to consume all that and we need curation. And curation is just the name of the game and aggregation and then a little voice to pull people in.


Elizabeth: [00:09:15] Absolutely. This makes me think about another shift that we've been observing as academics trying to understand the political information environment. It's this shift towards wanting more opinion and consumers of political information tending to want to hear the author's voice or the curator's voice. And that can sometimes be quite at odds with traditional journalistic standards and journalistic ethics. It also starts blurring the boundaries between political journalist and political pundit or social media influencer  or columnist or opinion writer. There's a lot of murky territory [the tensions between these roles is discussed in multiple Wonks and War Rooms episodes from Season 6, such as: Influencers with Taylor Lorenz, Political Influencers with Nate Lubin, News influencers with Rachel Gilmore, and Social Media in Politics with Dave Sommer]. [What] do you think about the difference between those kinds of people who are all using similar approaches? [For more about how audiences are increasingly seeking out journalists’ opinions on the news, consult: The Rise of the Talking Journalist: Human Voice, Engagement, and Trust in Live Journalism Performance].


Nick: [00:10:05] It's such an interesting question. This is the central tension that makes or breaks trust with our readers or listeners or viewers. If somebody sees you writing news one day, covering an event, at a press conference, asking a question and writing about it, almost like a news wire format, like just really straight up or a newspaper straight up reporting. And then the next day you have an opinion about it. I'm not sure that's healthy. 


Nick: [00:10:32] Because I'm not sure readers should be guessing about where you're going to be coming from tomorrow. Are you going to be telling them what happened, or are you going to be telling them what you think about it? There are some journalists in Ottawa who get a little more leeway to do both of those things, and I don't think it's unethical. I don't think it's dangerous for the value of the information that they're putting into the world. It doesn't mean that they have bad sources or that their facts are mistaken.


Nick: [00:10:57] But it is important for everybody to be one thing just on a trust level with their readers. It's not that readers won't trust what you're saying just by virtue of you having an opinion versus yesterday having reported something. But maybe a little bit of that, if you're starting to call on politicians to do things, when yesterday you were just saying, here's the thing that happened. I don't want to get into that territory. I think the newsletter and a lot of newsletters occupy this space where we're in analysis mode. Nobody thinks that we're telling them what we really think should happen next. We're just using our analysis brains and our sources to explain what's going to happen next. But again, I think it's okay to put humour into that too and to poke fun at people. I heard this somewhere along the way Politico kicked people in the shins, but I don't think that necessarily has to be opinion. It can be like you're bringing your reader along for a conversation. It's a little bit like a podcast where the reader doesn't get to say anything because the words are written and delivered to them, but it is a little more conversational and it's more personal, like you're getting the newsletter from whoever's writing it and you get familiar with their voice.


Elizabeth: [00:12:03] And you get to know them in some way. It's not necessarily that you're best friends with them because you read their newsletter, but you get to know their sense of humour, the kinds of examples they like to draw on, the styles they tend to use in their writing, and you feel a bit of a connection. In our work, we would call that creating a parasocial relationship, where there is some sense of intimacy built without there actually being a reciprocal relationship [consult the Wonks and War Rooms episode on parasocial relationships with T.X. Watson].


Nick: [00:12:32] And I think it's a little bit of what we experienced in the glory days of Twitter, when there would be these cultural moments and you would form these very brief relationships with people when something happened and it would feel like you knew them. This is a longer form version of that everyday. And talking about the substantive issues of the day, it's not just a fleeting moment on a social network. It becomes this real relationship and people will respond to what's in the newsletter. There's a lot of feedback there that isn't obvious to most readers because they don't see it, but it does happen.


Elizabeth: [00:13:02] Via email, or how do you get the feedback?


Nick: [00:13:04] It really depends. Email often, but our readership is a community of texters. And if they have your phone number, they'll text you the various texting forms. Some people are Signal people. Some people are WhatsApp people. Some people are just regular text. But it's a community of people. When you form that core audience who are glued to what you write or you hope they're glued to what you write, they're not afraid to be in touch, because they also know that their friends are reading it and that they can talk about it later. The goal is just to produce a thing that people talk about, and that creates a very interactive relationship with those readers [for more on the relational and unmediated nature of newsletters, consult: Email Newsletters and the Changing Journalist-Audience Relationship].


Elizabeth: [00:13:35] Absolutely. I was just going to ask, do you have a sense of whether or not your readers are interacting with each other? Are they communicating about what they're reading and building off of that in their day-to-day interactions?


Nick: [00:13:49] My dream come true, and it's going to sound borderline creepy, but I don't think it counts as creepy is when I'll get a text from somebody who will say, you mentioned my partner in the newsletter today, and we had a chuckle about it in bed while we woke up, because they're both reading it first thing in the morning. That's the dream for me, because that means that they are both really heavily engaged in this, because they're lobbyists or staffers or whatever.


Elizabeth: [00:14:14] It's the most Ottawa possible dream.


Nick: [00:14:16] In the most Ottawa possible newsletter is what I'm hoping for. Yes, so they will talk about it immediately. There [are] seconds between them opening their eyes and having a chuckle with the person three feet away from them. Or closer, I guess.


Elizabeth: [00:14:27] That's a very large bed.


Nick: [00:14:29] About whatever it is, whether it's their birthday or they got a new job or it might be a little more indirect, like maybe their boss, if they work for a minister, was the top of the newsletter because they're about to do something or they did something, and that staffer wakes up more quickly because they see that.


Nick: [00:14:45] There was another example of this. Another dream come true was the subject line on our newsletter when Parliament came back or was about to come back, was "No Sleep Until Christmas" because the House of Commons is going to be sitting a lot and all the receptions are back. The whole ecosystem comes to life again. I got a text from people, one person in particular who screenshotted other texts, and everyone was talking about how they had felt seen by that headline, which I also felt seen by when I saw it. That's just a great feeling when you know that people are talking about it and not in a way that is, I'm not shifting public policy, really. This is not the Globe [and Mail newspaper]. I'm not Bob Fife, but I'm getting people buzzing about whatever it is that is going to happen that day or drive that week. That's ultimately just fun. It's really fun.


Elizabeth: [00:15:27] The way you're describing it feels similar to the way social media influencers describe their relationship to their communities and their follower bases that they develop. This could be on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or wherever else. Last season on the podcast, I chatted with Rachel Gilmore about how she approaches influencer work from a journalism perspective in the news world [consult the season 6 Wonks and War Rooms episode, News Influencers with Rachel Gilmore]. Do you think about the role a newsletter plays similarly to the way a news focused YouTube channel is part of this? Or do you see those as serving different roles?


Nick: [00:16:07] I think it's a different subculture, but similar. But I would never claim to have the savvy of a content creator on YouTube. I follow many of them, people on Twitch who just have interactive conversations on a second-by-second basis with their followers while they're doing whatever.


Elizabeth: [00:16:23] Oh my gosh, the skill you need.


Nick: [00:16:25] I'm in awe of those people because they have such command of their audience. They're the super sized version of this. My connection with my audience is not quite that direct for obvious reasons, like they're not watching me draft the newsletter and go through the editing process and then hit publish.


Elizabeth: [00:16:37] You could create a Twitch channel for it if you wanted to.


Nick: [00:16:42] There's something a little bit similar in the dynamic where I will be maybe having coffee with someone. This happened this week. And we'll be talking about something that's coming up that was completely off my radar. And they said, well, I would talk about that thing. And in this case, it was the one year anniversary of Prime Minister Trudeau's comments on India in the House of Commons making allegations about the Indian government's alleged involvement in the killing of a Canadian. The coffee with this particular subject matter expert produced a section in the newsletter the next day. So he was kind of there for that Twitch style, iterative Ottawa playbook building process, just because he's a smart guy and he had smart thoughts and timely thoughts on something that I think people woke up to remembering only when they were prompted by that.


Nick: [00:17:26] I don't think a lot of people in Ottawa had it in their date book that this was the one year anniversary of this very significant thing. It was just by chance that we were having coffee that day. But that's a cool feature of the newsletter, and it's not inventing anything brand new. This is how reporters have always worked. But the fact that it's a daily feed for people and one day can lead into the next, and it can be a week long or a month long or a year long hand-holding exercise, like join me as I also digest this place I think sets it apart a little bit when you add in that colourful voice.


Elizabeth: [00:17:58] Absolutely. It makes me think about [how], in political communication work, we often think about the news cycle or the political information cycle or the legislative cycle [consult: Social media, political information cycle, and the evolution of news]. We like to use the metaphor of a cycle a lot in academic research.


Elizabeth: [00:18:15] What is striking me about how you're describing the value of this newsletter approach is that it puts us back into roughly a 24 hour news cycle, which lots of people said was dead when Twitter and other social media cropped up, and all of a sudden you had to be updating things constantly [consult: The Impacts and Challenges of Mass Media in a 24-Hour News Cycle and The speed of news in Twitter (X) versus radio]. The newsletter is a way of saying no, every 24 hours we're going to do a bit of a reset and a check-in. You could argue that podcasts that do weekly episodes are doing the same thing, creating a weekly cycle to help guide people through this mess of just constant information.


Nick: [00:18:54] I think what it proves is that in a world that is definitely not every 24 hours, you can still succeed with that 24 hour rhythm baked in. So people can do it all, and they can look to you to make sense of that rapid fire cycle, not 24 hour, but 24 minute, 24 second once a day.


Nick: [00:19:12] But we are well aware that we're not the only thing out there. We, in fact, thrive on other journalists doing great work that we can link to reporters who report stories that do change policy and make politicians feel uncomfortable, reporters who go to scrums, who ask tough questions in a way that even if they don't get the answers that are satisfying, they definitely, again, make people who have power uncomfortable. That makes our work more powerful because we can show that off. Or we can at least make our readers aware of it and aware that probably there's going to be a scrum the next day or the day after, or somebody's going to be a thorn in someone's side. You can find a way to thrive in that cycle and a whole bunch of people are doing it. And it's not just newsletters, but the most important thing is really driving into your audience and understanding who is actually reading what you're writing and serving them, which has always been what we do in journalism. This is just a very specific execution of that.


Elizabeth: [00:20:07] It's really interesting to hear you talk about how this newsletter fits into that wider environment and how you're linking to all this other reporting that's getting done and speaking about the other newsletters and the other formats that are all involved. So let's zoom out for a second. When we think about what that  information environment looks like today, what are the key pieces for you of that? We've talked about newsletters a bunch now, because obviously that's what you do in your work right now. But what are the other key pieces that you imagine are important for, let's say, your audiences that you're trying to understand and connect with? What else is in their environment?


Nick: [00:20:50] There are so many answers to that question because there were so many inputs, depending [on] who you are in this world. I imagine a senior bureaucrat reads the playbook for a completely different reason than the junior political staffer and the lobbyist versus the politician. There are some people who we know read our newsletter only for the listings of [parliamentary] committee meetings that day. So their actual news consumption is maybe as simple as going to National Newswatch, like a lot of people do in Ottawa, and just relying on that news aggregator as the source of the stories they know are going to be relevant for their workday. Or other people will rely on just the evening news.


Nick: [00:21:28] There's all kinds of different ways people consume information, but we know that they look specifically for certain things in our newsletter. So some people just read the top because they like the funny voices or take on the day. Some people just look at the leaders’ itineraries because they want to know where party leaders are. Some people make sure they read the media room that we have, which has like five stories that they think, they probably have come up with five stories I definitely should read today. And then other people scroll right down to the bottom to what we call the playbook section, which is where there are birthdays and what we call movers and shakers. So people who leave or come to new places, new firms, new political offices in Ottawa or elsewhere, and they get the excuse sometimes to get in touch with somebody because they see their name there.


Nick: [00:22:11] If it's someone's birthday, they can send them a text or an email and say, happy birthday. It's a way into a conversation that day, whatever their purpose is for getting in touch with that person, it's a way in. Those are all very specific use cases for our newsletter, and some of them mean that they're not really getting any news out of our newsletter. And that's fine by us because they're finding other reasons to make it useful. What we want, of course, is everyone to read the thing top to bottom. But sometimes it's 2500 words, and that's a lot to expect from people who have busy lives.


Nick: [00:22:38] That doesn't really answer your question at all, except to narrow what they actually get from us and expand the options in the menu that they can fill their other time with. Though I would not underestimate National Newswatch as this news aggregator, it's existed as long as I've been an adult. They did a redesign not too long ago. But really functionally, it offers the same service it's offered for 20 years almost, and people still talk about it. It's still the thing people go to throughout the day to figure out who reported what on an ongoing basis from the Hill . I don't know how much you hear that, but I definitely hear that all the time.


Elizabeth: [00:23:12] It's an impressive history that National News watch has had because we rarely see a single website or platform dominate in any space for a very long time. National Newswatch has maintained its place as the one that a lot of people go to. A lot of people who use National Newswatch are using it professionally for whatever [during] their work day [to] keep up with what's going on and then may supplement with an evening news program that they like, or a podcast that they regularly listen to, or a bunch of different ones. They also typically have social feeds that are filled that they tune in or out of, depending on preferences and the day and those kinds of things. As you're describing your role and the role of the newsletter and you were mentioning some people use it not really to get news at all, it's for other things within this political Ottawa sphere.



Elizabeth: [00:24:13] The fishbowl, I like that. You guys aren't alone in creating those extra things about what's going on on the Hill, what's going on in Ottawa more broadly. There are lots of political pundits with podcasts and there are lobbyists and there are commentators and there are academics who are all throwing in information in lots of different formats. Where do we draw lines between what is journalistic work and what is punditry? Tiny question for you [For more information about the difference between journalism and punditry, consult the article:  Are pundits journalists?].


Nick: [00:24:49] If I could expand it a bit. What is the line between journalistic work and just trivia? There's no journalism involved in printing someone's birthday, except to say that you also sometimes rely on sources.


Elizabeth: [00:25:02] You had to decide who was newsworthy enough to have their birthday printed.


Nick: [00:25:07] That's true. Maybe I'm understating it a little bit, but it's definitely not reporting something that is in the broad public interest.


Nick: [00:25:16] It's feeding people's need to see their names and their friend's names in a place of some repute. That's it. Whatever repute we are. I would want to expand the question to cover that, although they definitely are two very different branches away from journalism. That's such a good question. I don't even know if I have a great answer, to be honest. I'm going to say the three words that people often don't say in Ottawa, which is, I don't know.


Nick: [00:25:41] Mostly people are afraid to admit they don't know things. It goes back to the conversation we had a little bit earlier about presenting yourself as an opinion writer one day, and a reporter the next. In order to pull that off, or in order to pull off being a pundit on one of the shows where you're a reporter who's revealing a little more about how you feel about the news, and then go back to being a reporter. It just requires such trust with your audience. It just really does.


Nick: [00:26:04] I remember having a really close relationship with the analytics when I worked at Maclean's Magazine. I wrote a daily newsletter there for a little while, and was just obsessed with looking at who was reading it, and we just knew so much about all those people. But if I made an error, and if it was an embarrassing one, like not a catastrophic one that misdirected everybody on some super important fact, but truly just a really bad one, like misspelling someone's name who's name I shouldn't misspell because it was just a typo, people would unsubscribe.


Nick: [00:26:34] People would unsubscribe on those days in higher numbers than on another day that was just more normal. The pattern was so clear. If you make a dumb error, people say, well, that's enough, that's too much, I'm out. That's the worst case scenario, someone deciding that they're just not going to look at the thing anymore. Not only are they not going to open it, they're going to unsubscribe so it just doesn't even pop up in their inbox. People are really willing to just discard you and so you[‘ve] got to make sure that there's a good faith relationship between what you're reporting or writing for them and what they think they're getting and what they're actually getting.


Elizabeth: [00:27:05] That makes sense.


Nick: [00:27:06] Doesn't really answer your question because, again, I don't know the definitive answer to that, but if you're going to go on TV and you're going to leave the reporting lane a little bit, there are people who are very good at that, and I'm sure it's because they're comfortable with the trust they have with whatever their other audience is, whether it's a print audience or a broadcast audience.


Elizabeth: [00:27:22] What you're saying now fits with some of the earlier discussions we were having. It makes me think about how important it is for the person creating this content and putting it out there, in whatever format it is, @Mediumfor them to have a consistency for their readers, their audience. Their audience wants some level of "I know what to expect out of you, and you're going to keep doing the thing that I have decided to follow you for, right?" You've picked a lane, now stay in it. It's okay that there's lots of different lanes now on this highway and not just one journalism reporter kind of lane and one commentator kind of lane and one lobbyist kind of lane. There's a bunch and sometimes they overlap a bit. But as long as you just clearly define which one you're in, you'll find your audience and they're going to be okay with it until you veer off.


Nick: [00:28:16] That's about right. It's a relationship that is tenuous, but when it works, it works really well. It's riding this line between giving the readers what they expect. So if they expect you to set up their day, great. But not being predictable because predictable is boring and boring is bad. If we're not seen to be having fun at Politico, like I can't speak for my colleagues, though I think we share this. I have fun every day, and I try to make it clear in the writing that I am having fun. If they sense that I'm meeting their expectations on setting them up for their day and having fun while I'm doing it, then that is like the secret sauce for me [note: ‘secret sauce’ refers to a specific element that assists in success].


Elizabeth: [00:28:51] Create that light heartedness right off the bat.


Nick: [00:28:54] If people are jealous of the fun it looks like I'm having, then that's amazing because that means I'm lucky. I am very lucky to be able to do this. It's cool. It's fun to be able to write this way, and other people would have more fun doing other forms of journalism. This is, it turns out, my happy place. It fits the profile of who I want to be. It's a really lucky gig. But it also is key to the success of the whole thing, is having fun, being seen to have fun and still fitting that into the expectations of your readers.


Elizabeth: [00:29:25] What's cool about how you've been able to go about that is you've been able to create this trusted relationship with a set of readers who expect you to show that fun, show that humour, show that voice, but still trust that you are getting them accurate information, relevant information. Often when we're talking about the kinds of political information delivery that are more fun, they are ones that are seen to be less focused on accuracy or less focused on getting the exact right information in front of you. I think about political memes, super fun, but not necessarily about really setting the agenda for the most important discussions you should be having with your political friends that day.


Nick: [00:30:11] For sure.


Elizabeth: [00:30:13] All right. This has been a great conversation. We are running out of time. Normally in Wonks and War Rooms, I've started out with a really clear definition of a concept and then I give you a pop quiz and see if you can tell me what it is. But we didn't do that this episode. So instead, what I would love to hear from you, can you sum up very briefly what you think the role of a newsletter like yours is for the Ottawa political folk? What's the one sentence of what it does?


Nick: [00:30:48] This is the elevator pitch I give many nights at the Met [referring to the Metropolitain Brasserie, a restaurant in downtown Ottawa] to people who have had probably one too many drinks and I need to maintain a conversation with. What I hope and what we hope the newsletter accomplishes is a vehicle that guides them through the day to come in a way that doesn't freak them out, soothes their anxiety because this is an anxiety filled town, and gives them a chuckle along the way and they learn something. Everyone's got to learn something, and the things they learn, should be useful or not, just stupid trivia. If we can just give someone a nice push into the day, that's pretty much it.


Elizabeth: [00:31:26] I love that. Thank you. This has been a great conversation.


Nick: [00:31:30] Thanks for having me.


Elizabeth: [00:31:32] Thank you for listening. That was our episode looking at the role of newsletters in our political information environment. We talked about a whole bunch of different topics and referenced some past episodes, so be sure to check out the show notes and our annotated transcripts that are available in English and French. For a bunch more links, you can head over to polcommtech.ca to find those. I also want to acknowledge that I am recording from the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin people, and I want to pay respect to the Algonquin people, acknowledging their long standing relationship with this unceded territory.

Tags:

Comments

Commenting has been turned off.
1/23
bottom of page