What's your workflow for sourcing content for a curated newsletter?
I am working on starting a curated newsletter to highlight interesting, relatable, content in an industry where most of the "news" is dry stats, sales numbers, and press releases about slightly updated products from mega-corps, and I'm having trouble filtering through all the boringness to get to stuff people might actually want to read.
For those of you who run newsletters where you curate actually interesting stories, how do you find the wheat in the sea of chaff?
Edit: I want to avoid reading all the super-dry industry news to get the good stuff. I can skim headlines if needed, but spending 15 hours a week reading doesn't seem like a great ROI. There must be a better way.
I do a small internal one for about 10 people. Here's the actual workflow, not the aspirational one:
Sources (set once, tweak maybe quarterly): 5 RSS feeds from industry blogs, 2 YouTube channels, 1 Reddit subreddit, and HN.
Daily (~5 min): scan AI-generated summaries of my feeds. Star anything that could make the cut.
Weekly (~20 min): pick the top 5-7 from starred items. Write a "why this matters" sentence for each. Add a two-line intro connecting them. Send it out through Buttondown.
Stuff I learned by doing it wrong first: don't try to be comprehensive. 5 good links beat 15 mediocre ones. The "why this matters" sentence is the most valuable part of the whole email. And consistency matters more than quality — a decent weekly email beats a polished monthly one you keep pushing back.
The sourcing/scanning used to eat 30+ minutes a day. Automating the first pass with AI summaries cut that to five.
I usually spend 1.5 - 2 hours every 2 weeks for my bi-weekly newsletter.
My newsletter series contains 4 sections:
Thanks! The Typeform interview is interesting as opposed to an email chain. I probably won't be doing interviews to start, but as we grow enough to have an audience that people will be willing to interview for we'll explore doing things like that.
This is a good question. My newsletter that I am working on is based on business, marketing, self improvement sales books that I have read. That means of course I have read the books but I use other content to add to it. So If I know the topic I want to point out in the newsletter. I would check Youtube for any good videos on it. I do have time limits for the topic in terms of my audience attention as well as how much time I can dedicate to it.
Also to keep organized I like to use Google Keep and Docs.
Do you just keep notes of stuff to put in the newsletter as you read it, then search Youtube for some matching videos?
this is a great question. I'm using RescueTime as a productivity tracker, but it also has the added benefit of logging sites I use. It also conveniently syncs across all my devices.
I also just telegram chat myself since I have a version of it for desktop as well which syncs across devices.
As for podcasts, I still haven't found a great way to collect notes and bite-sized insights.
So do you go through your RescueTime browsing history when you need to put together a newsletter?
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To clarify your list of sources: is that a list you have developed over time?
I like the idea of writing ideas on paper, (maybe because I listened to an interview with Ryder Carroll yesterday where he discussed paper as a filtering process).
This comment was deleted 5 years ago