Delivering Connecticut news town by town
What does hyperlocal news look like in a state with 169 towns? At The Connecticut Examiner, readers told us it meant news from their own town.
Working with our editor in chief, I launched 17 automated Local Updates newsletters in summer 2025, each covering one town, along with the data and signup systems to reach the right readers.
Audience research
Newsletter readers were already our most engaged audience, spending 210% more time on the site than readers from search, our second most-engaged group. With newsletters our strongest channel for engagement, my next question was what readers wanted from them.
I surveyed 129 readers and followed up with dozens of interviews over email. Town government was the most-requested topic at 79.4%, 20 points ahead of state government (59.5%). When we asked what they'd want from a new newsletter, 55.8% wanted one about a specific town, and 44.2% wanted one about their region.
In addition to editorial needs, local news mattered to revenue. Paying members' most-cited reason for paying was coverage of their town, chosen by 61.6%, overindexing against the wider audience.
We also had a discoverability problem. As a small newsroom covering a large part of southern Connecticut, we publish only a few stories a month about each town, and readers told us they were missing them. Those stories ran in our Sunday Digest, but many readers found the volume overwhelming. One reader put it simply: "Make sure town-specific stories are easier to find."
Migration
Local newsletters required two things: knowing each reader's town, and sending stories in an automatic afternoon digest. Our email provider at the time, Mailchimp, couldn't easily sync ZIP code data from our MemberPress membership platform or connect to the site's town-based RSS feeds.
I migrated our email platform from Mailchimp to MailerLite, connecting member data to email for the first time. That let us segment readers by the towns they live in and send automatically from each town's feed.
Launch
I built 17 newsletters in MailerLite, one for each town in our areas of highest coverage. Each is an automated campaign that pulls from its town's feed and sends a weekday afternoon digest, but only when there's a new story.
To keep Local Updates recognizable across 17 newsletters and our social promotion, I extended CT Examiner's existing site design into a flexible brand system.
With member data connected, I built custom segments to promote each newsletter to readers in its town. In just a few days, through a combination of the town-specific emails, a general announcement, Facebook posts, and promotion on the site, one in six of all newsletter subscribers chose to opt in to a Local Updates newsletter.
Results
At four weeks post-launch, Local Updates subscribers had a click-through rate twice that of our general email audience. Newsletter-driven traffic to the site more than doubled, increasing 103%.
The newsletters also put CT Examiner's in-depth local reporting in front of the readers who wanted it most. Local focus became one of the three pillars of our 2026 membership relaunch, and Local Updates are now a key part of our welcome series and membership offer.
