For this week’s blog, I took a look at the regular WBUR newsletter emails I get every day. The emails were fairly easy to sign up for–a prompt visible in multiple spots on the WBUR website directs you to input your email and sign up for the newsletter, and I did so earlier on in the semester, both for this blog and just to keep up with the news. The emails themselves tend to arrive early in the morning, around 7:15-7:20 AM each day, and they’re definitely marketed as something you can check out to catch up in the morning.
Within the email itself, the first thing we see is the WBUR logo, as well as a button encouraging listeners to donate and a link to view the email in a browser. Below that is a conversationally-written summary of some of the previous day’s news stories. It’s mostly text, and is written by Megan McGinnes, WBUR’s newsletter editor. The text is really made in a style that feels casual and directly to the reader–there’s a little forecast for the day’s weather with a cloud weather icon, it starts out by saying “Good Morning Boston,” and the writer’s voice is a lot more present in the text than you’d see in the actual text or audio of some of the news stories it’s discussing. First person seems to be okay here, as well as linking more indirectly to stories–in the first couple lines of Wednesday’s email, a hyperlink leads you to a video of Ed Markey mispronouncing Governor Baker’s name as “Governor Bacon”, with very little explanation of what the link leads to other than that “the next time you stumble or stutter on your work Zoom call, just remember, it could always be worse.”
The newsletter seems to have some more freedom to be conversational and direct because its goal, in some aspects, is to get readers to click further, and read the full stories that are linked or summarized in the email. The first few paragraphs are fairly sparse with links, but summarize national news, again in a style that’s a lot different from the formal articles you typically see on the website. It also ends with a request for sources for a story, which is a really cool way to reach out to the community–an email link where readers can communicate with WBUR reporter Martha Bebinger, who is “looking for people who’ve postponed a pregnancy during the pandemic” for a story.
Further down, we see the story that this particular email’s tagline (“Why don’t we have body cameras?”) comes from, summarized briefly in a few sentences and clearly linked for readers to check out more. Several other of the day’s stories are below that, and all of them have multiple links and places to click through, including spots to repost links to the articles on Twitter and Facebook. Below that are some more specified categories–there’s a category specifically for coronavirus vaccine coverage, as that’s the persistent story of the day; there is what looks like a more eclectic features/arts section named “Anything else?” and a link to an audio and text interview with an author that’s labeled as “your daily must listen”.
The COVID section also has a link to sign up to a specifically COVID-19 related newsletter, another project that the station has been continuing throughout the pandemic. There’s also a space where the editor lists a few interesting stories and pieces from other outside publications as a “What we’re reading”, something I’ve noticed is a trend with some newsletters like this.
WBUR actually offers a plethora of different newsletters, which you can sign up for by clicking through an expanded link at the bottom of the email. Some of them are likely less active during the pandemic, such as their events space newsletter, but the others are connected to various beats and more niche categories, such as science or health reporting. Having many different options–similar to the way the stories are generally organized on the WBUR website–gives readers a way to build their own experience and focus on what stories are interesting to them, which seems in alignment with the way a lot of WBUR’s coverage is structured online, with many different directions to explore.
Julia Maruca 
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