It’s been less than six months since Lenny Letter, an email newsletter aimed at young women created by Girls creator Lena Dunham and her co-producer Jenni Konner, launched.
Lenny Letter would have gotten attention and subscribers even if it were much less meaty than it actually is. But the newsletter, which comes out twice a week — a full issue on Tuesdays and an interview on Fridays — is substantive and original. (Lenny Letter’s Instagram tagline: “Dismantling the patriarchy, one newsletter at a time.”) Jessica Grose, an author and former senior editor at Slate, is Lenny Letter’s editor-in-chief. The newsletter regularly tackles topics like politics, abortion, and race, recently featuring lengthy interviews with Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards. Obama’s senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, author Helen Oyeyemi, and Saturday Night Live cast member Sasheer Zamata have contributed guest pieces. Each story is illustrated with original, commissioned art.On top of this, there is an actual business model beyond “Lena Dunham!” Lenny Letter is supported by an ad partnership with Hearst, and Hearst promotes the product across the websites of its magazines like Cosmopolitan and Hearst.
This mix has helped Lenny Letter reach more than 400,000 subscribers, and the newsletter has a covetable 65 percent open rate. All content is also published to the Lenny Letter website (after a delay), and the site’s uniques topped 600,000 in February. While Lenny Letter doesn’t have thorough demographic information on its readers yet, most are women between the ages of 18 and 34.
Lenny Letter editor Jessica Grose spoke with me about newsletter strategy, promotion, and the company’s “continued intentionality” in publishing a diverse set of writers and illustrators. Our conversation, slightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
Please read this. So powerful. So important. #LennyLetter https://t.co/aEfqBISfDc
— kerry washington (@kerrywashington) February 24, 2016
There’s always some kind of delay, though, and that’s because we want to incentivize people to subscribe. The newsletter is the main product. We think it’s really special and different to read it in the newsletter format. We spend a lot of time commissioning illustrations. We really want people to look at it in this kind of combined mini-magazine format, ideally. But we also want as many readers as possible, so we’re trying to have both sides a little bit.
Our Friday newsletter is just one piece of content, an interview, that goes up simultaneously on the web and in people’s inboxes.
On social media, we’ve started teasing the stuff that’s going to be in the Tuesday newsletter on Monday. We’ll say something like, “You can only get this content tomorrow, before anybody else, if you sign up.” But once anything goes online, we, of course, want it to be read, so we tweet it immediately. This also sometimes includes calls to action to subscribe to the newsletter.
Having a diverse staff is imperative to the process. Of the editorial employees, I’m full-time, and I’m white, but the other full-time employee, Laia Garcia, is Puerto Rican. Our two part-time employees are both black. Everybody has a bit of a different perspective and a different group of people they read. Just their influences — what they’re bringing in, who they talk about at edit meetings — is different. Having all these voices in the room, when we are talking about what we’re going to assign, is really pivotal.
It’s also just continued intentionality, looking at the mix of every newsletter we put out and trying to make sure that not just the writers but the illustrators are diverse. The writers obviously get more attention, but Laia has done an amazing job of making sure that we’re getting illustrations from a group of women who are not just diverse in terms of race but in terms of sexual orientation and even in terms of being international. Laia is fluent in Spanish and she grew up in Puerto Rico. We have illustrators who speak Spanish, not English, and Laia’s able to commission these illustrations and have the artistic discussion with them that I wouldn’t be able to have because I’m not fluent in Spanish.
It has to be baked into every step of the process. We can’t be like, well, we made sure our first issue was really diverse, and that’s enough. It has to be ongoing. I’m sure there will be times when we don’t live up to what we would like to see in our publication, but we are really trying our best.
Enterprise reporting takes a lot of money and a lot of time, both of which we don’t have endless amounts of, but that’s a goal of mine. And maybe a serialized story. In some ways, newsletters are a really old Internet form, but people kind of forgot about them for so long that it feels as if there’s a way we can be innovative and do different things that haven’t been done before. I mean, everything’s been done before — I don’t want to pretend that we’re reinventing the wheel — but I would like to experiment with the form a little bit.
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