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I’ve spent a lot of time coaching youth baseball over the last decade. And it was on local baseball fields around Washington, D.C., that I first began to understand the power of email newsletters.
When other parents would mention my work at The Times, they would often be talking about an item from the morning newsletter that I wrote for The Times’s Opinion section. They would say something nice about it — or tell me what they thought I’d gotten wrong.
I had started working on it in 2016 as a side project at the suggestion of James Bennet, who had recently become my boss as The Times’s top Opinion editor. Each weekday, The Times sent out an email with links to every Opinion article. Many people opened the email, but James thought it seemed like a missed opportunity, because we didn’t add any fresh material.
So he asked if I wanted to write a short introduction each day. He said that I’d need to do it for only a couple of months, and then he would figure out what to do with the newsletter.
But I ended up doing it for more than three years, until last week. I got hooked, because I came to realize — on those baseball fields and elsewhere — how many people rely on email newsletters. They have become a 21st century version of a print newspaper: a daily habit, delivered to the same convenient place every morning.
Email, of course, has some big disadvantages compared with a print newspaper or a website. Newsletters can’t fully capture the depth of reporting, photography and data visualization that The Times does. But they can point readers to all of those things.
Ben Thompson, a widely respected media analyst, argues that the newsletter boom stems from ubiquity of email. Virtually everyone has an account. And while email may not be glamorous, it is unlikely to be replaced in the foreseeable future — even as social-media platforms rise and fall. Thompson has built his own publication, Stratechery, as an email newsletter.
Another media observer named Ben — Ben Smith, a Times columnist and previously the editor of BuzzFeed News — joked this week on Twitter about the trend: Many news organizations are realizing, he wrote, that “we are, in varying degrees, email newsletter publishers with websites.”
Starting today, I’ll be the lead writer of the newsroom’s main morning newsletter, working with colleagues in New York, Washington and London. It has quietly built the largest audience of any Times product, with a subscriber base of more than 17 million, and The Times has decided to devote more resources to it. As part of the change, I’ve stopped writing my Opinion column and come back to the newsroom, where I’ve spent most of 20-year Times career.
The newsletter will have a new look, with stories organized more clearly by subject, to help you make sense of our complex, fast-changing world. I’ll be writing a short introduction each day. You’ll see more graphics, and some new features — written by Tara Parker-Pope of Well, the Culture editor Gilbert Cruz and others. You’ll get to go behind the scenes with Times reporters covering the news from more than 150 countries. And the newsletter’s name will change, from the Morning Briefing to simply The Morning.
Our goal is to provide you with news, clarity and, ideally, some delight — in just a few minutes of reading time.
One of the joys of my 20-year Times career has been the chance to switch between traditional jobs and more entrepreneurial ones. I’ve been a business reporter, Op-Ed columnist, magazine staff writer and Washington bureau chief, all positions that have existed for decades. I was also the founding editor of The Upshot section — which tries to tell stories in new ways, often with visualization — and the creator of new columns in the Sports and Business sections.
As a lifelong Times reader, I’ve always felt a thrill at taking on one of the more established jobs, remembering all of the people I admired who had it before. But the entrepreneurial jobs offer a different thrill, one that in some ways is even more rewarding. They are an opportunity to help The Times keep being The Times, in a new era.
I hope you’ll check out The Morning — and give us plenty of feedback.
Sign up here to receive The Morning, and reach David and his colleagues at themorning@nytimes.com.
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A New Companion for Your Morning - The New York Times
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