About Daybreak

The Goal

Straightforward, useful information in a friendly voice that helps you feel connected to the community around you and doesn’t waste your time.

What Is Daybreak?

It’s a weekday-morning email newsletter (with a website) focused on the Upper Valley, with side excursions into the rest of Vermont and New Hampshire. It began at the end of February 2019 with 25 subscribers and tops 15,000 now. In addition to short news items with links, Daybreak offers photographs sent in by readers; a weekly collection of brief sketches from around the region also sent in by readers; book write-ups from area booksellers, writers, and librarians; trail recommendations from the Upper Valley Trails Alliance; puzzles and games every day, including a weekly news quiz; and some little bit of daily diversion from elsewhere.

Why’d You Start It?

Well, the flip answer is that I’d been working for a local-news startup and left it in February 2019 and needed something to do. The less flip answer is that back then the newsletter world was still in its toddlerhood: National newsletters like TheSkimm and NYT Cooking were proving there was a market for reliable information in a personal voice, and I was curious to see whether that was true at the local level.

Also, I’d had a lot of conversations with friends who complained there was nothing interesting in the local news and that there was not much going on for entertainment around here, and I knew they were wrong — but people needed an easy and quick way of learning about it all.

Who Is Your Audience?

The bulk of it is people who either live in the Upper Valley, which is centered around Lebanon and Hanover, NH, and Hartford (White River Junction), VT, or who live elsewhere but are interested in what’s going on here, or who just like all the non-Upper Valley material. In all, there are about 42 towns in the region and, depending on how you define it, maybe 160,000 people.

Do You Collect Data On Those Readers?

Nope, nothing other than email address and first name.

Has Anything Surprised You About Running a Newsletter?

I’m surprised almost every day. Some of it is minor: I had no idea how much email I’d get every day. Some of it’s major: I set out to provide news and information, but what I didn’t understand at first was that readers were looking for more than just news: they wanted to know it was coming from a real person, and they wanted to feel some connection to one another.

In a lot of ways, I’ve come to understand that readers want both what traditional news has always given them—to be updated on what’s happening around them, to be educated about what matters to them (and about things they didn’t realize mattered to them until someone explained it), to get some perspective, to get some help navigating where they live—and things that are less obvious, like diversion from the constant stream of news, plus inspiration, plus connection. I had no idea of any of that going into this.

What’s Different About Running Daybreak vs. Being a Reporter?

Let me start by talking about what’s not different. My first reporting job was at Congressional Quarterly. It was a privately owned magazine of record on Congress (though I was in the politics section, covering elections), and news organizations, lobbyists, politicians, the executive branch, and lots of other people depended on it for unimpeachable facts. So the basics of journalism—verifying information, even-handed reporting, etc—got drilled into me early. The two great fears of being a reporter—getting something wrong and missing something important—are still my fears. Similarly, explaining complicated issues in ways that are accessible to the average reader: That hasn’t changed, either.

On the other hand, running a newsletter like Daybreak means doing everything: research, reporting, writing, fact-checking, dealing with ads, dealing with complaints, sending out thank-you notes to contributors, messing around with the insane vagaries of the big email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Apple, and especially Comcast), understanding metrics tools, coming up with new features, testing new features… you get the idea. It’s also meant trying to deepen my understanding of everything I have to write about, from weather systems (it’s New England; every day is different) to state politics to local businesses to the schools and health care and crime and the arts and the local food scene… And yes, in case you’re wondering, that part of it is a blast!