How to position editorial content for your readers.

Editor's note: The following is excerpted from The Newsletter on Newsletters' new book, How to Write & Edit Must-Read Newsletters, by Fred Goss. The examples Fred cites are particularly relevant these days following the mid-term elections. To order the book, go to http://NewsletterContentGuru.com.

"Hillary Clinton builds '08 War Chest as Bush Poll Numbers Hit New Lows"

You may not have seen this headline in 100 publications in the Spring of 2006 because I just made it up, but you saw many just like it, except in newsletters.

When I was executive director at the Newsletter Publishers Association I wrote one Presidential October that if my news sources were limited to the newsletters coming across my desk, I might not have even known a presidential election was occurring.

Except for Charlie Cook's and a couple of other political titles, newsletters did not cover the campaigns. For most other newsletters the political campaign wasn't what people bought a subscription to read about.

Now, after the election dust settles, there is always a boatload of stories on "What President XXX will mean for ..." a particular newsletter's target audience. My personal favorite of these came in December of 1992 when Andrew Harper's Hideaway Report noted that the historic Old Capital Hotel was the only place to stay in Little Rock if you were going there to lobby the Clinton transition team.

Rule of thumb

If you can read it first in The New York Times or Newsweek (let alone find it online), it isn't what your subscribers are paying to get. Exception: Gersh Fishbein would say, "If I can add, 'As previously reported in Environews,' I'll always follow up on stories the dailies may be covering."

At one time the merger between Marathon and Conoco Oil was the largest corporate merger in U.S. history. US Oil Week, however, was aimed at oil jobbers, the middlemen. So the newsletter story went straight to its readers' interest, with the headline, 'Oil Jobbers See Little Effect from Conoco-Marathon Merger."

Give readers what they want

Consultant Steve Sahlein almost started a brawl at a newsletter conference editors' session when he suggested that the job of an editor was to figure out what the readers of a newsletter wanted and give it to them rather than some "higher calling" determining what the readers "should know." I totally agree. As Steve said, "If I want a rich, fudgy brownie, don't tell me I should be eating tofu."

Add "So what?"

Earlier I mentioned the traditional five Ws and an H of traditional newspaper journalism. Harry Baisden, longtime editorial director at Pasha and currently the same at the newsletter association, adds an important seventh for newsletter editorial: "So What?" He finds this is probably more important than any of the others. "What does it mean to your readers? That's the key to good newsletter journalism."

Which of the following leads do you think readers of a transportation newsletter will be more likely to read?

* President Clinton last week signed into law a new tax on over-the-road transport of heavy goods.

* Over-the-road freight haulers face a 15% increase in federal taxes thanks to a new tax bill President Clinton approved last week.

Yes, the second is not as succinct as the first, but by working in the impact on your readers, you give them much more reason to read the story.

In some newsrooms this is called the Implication Lead. What is the implication of a particular event on the reader? Whatever you call it, the more you tell your reader what the impact of an event will be on him or her, the more chance you're going have to get that all-important communication to you, a signed check at renewal time.

Also, Harry adds, "Don't assume because a topic is something everyone in the industry is talking about, your readers will read anything about it. By the time you get to it, the subscriber could be in this mode: "If I see one more story about XX, I'm going to scream." Don't give him or her a chance to scream. Put the implication--the "so what"--right there in the lead.

RELATED ARTICLE: Whoops!

While writing an October 4 article on a court decision in favor of a newsletter editor, we must have been subliminally affected by the harvest season.

A reader wrote: "I'm sure I'm late on this, but 43:17 just crossed my desk. Subpoenas are quashed, not squashed."

To my mind, squash is the layperson's quash.--P.S.