What should a local newsletter include?

When I ask new subscribers what they care about most, roughly 80% pick events. Restaurants are usually number two. That one survey answer decides most of my layout.

The goal is to be the media company that features everything people care about locally and nothing they don't. I run this in well over a dozen markets, and the mix is basically the same everywhere. People are the same.

What order should the sections go in?

In early 2025 my once-a-week local newsletters ran like this:

1. Featured event of the week, a big image at the very top. It gets tons of clicks.
2. News.
3. Restaurants.
4. A local business.
5. A fancy house. People like to click on fancy houses. It's always one of the top clicks.
6. All the events at the bottom.

Since then the issue has filled out. Today a typical one opens with a short personal editorial, then the event of the week ("if you only go to one, this is the one"), then one or two news items, one or two restaurants, a featured business, a pet of the week, a volunteer opportunity, real estate and events. If a restaurant opened, we always cover it. If not, we feature one people may not know.

When I set the rules for our AI writer in 2026, I gave it ranges instead of fixed counts:

Section	How many
Local news	1 to 3 stories (as low as one when nothing's good)
Events	6 to 8, one featured, ideally with an image and the broadest appeal
Jobs	4 to 6, one featured
Real estate	3 homes: a cheap one, an average one and a fancy one

For events, there are probably 100 happening this week, all over the internet. We pick the 20 or so you might care about and split them into family events and adult events. In some brands it's the 10 best events in the next seven days. Real estate is one of the biggest sections. Ours is written by AI from a Zillow link, and the images look really nice.

Swap the order around once you have your own survey data, but don't bury the events.

What should you leave out?

We don't cover crime, and we don't cover boring things people don't care about. A lot of traditional local media spends its energy on city council meetings and which organization got a $400,000 grant. As a random local person, I don't care. That's why they get low engagement.

What people actively want to know:

• What restaurants are opening or closing?
• Why is the road closed this week, and when does it reopen?
• What events are happening, and what's the most fun thing to do this week?
• What new business is opening?
• Where can I take my kids for two hours on a Saturday?

We also stay away from politics and anything negative or controversial. That's my take, not a law. I know somebody crushing it doing the opposite.

If there's no interesting news in a small town that week, don't pretend there is. Skip the news and add more restaurant content. When there is news, Google News searched by your zip code and local Facebook groups find most of it.

Don't narrow the other way, either. A coupons-only newsletter loses the upper-middle-class readers advertisers want. They don't read for coupons, but they'll click one sitting next to the story they came for. Give people as many reasons as possible to open it: news, a restaurant, events and the deals together.

What should a brand-new newsletter start with?

Events and restaurants. Hard news is the hardest thing to cover well and it's not what most readers signed up for.

"Start with what's easy and events and restaurants. I mean, it's easier than trying to cover the news."

Get the most engaging stuff right first, then grow into other coverage. One cheap win from day one: go to Zillow and find the most expensive house listed. I don't have a real estate background. A $20 million house is entertainment, even for people who will never buy it. If you only have time for one section, read whether a newsletter can be only events.

Which sections make it feel human?

This is the part that separates you from the AI aggregator sites that keep popping up.

• A short personal editorial from a real local person. My kids are always in mine.
• Memes at the end. Always at the end.
• Images or GIFs in most sections. Not every one, but most. The main story always gets one.
• A poll at the top, when you can come up with a good one.
• Community features like pet of the week or a volunteer corner. AI technically could do those. It won't for years.
• Real people you know. Feature your friends. As long as it's interesting, feature anybody.

Community spotlights can be small and useful. In our senior newsletter, telling readers they can get free tax prep was a real help. Another operator I talked to runs a reader-submitted pet of the week: people send photos of their own dogs, one gets featured, and he gets really good engagement and more replies. People are crazy about their pets.

Where do ads and calls to action go?

If the newsletter sells something (your ads, your realty business, your insurance agency), I put calls to action near the top, in the middle and at the end. A pop-out call to action mid-issue works well. At the bottom, a real signature with a photo and a couple of links.

Run ad sections before anyone pays for them. A recurring section like real estate becomes a habit readers get used to. If nobody's paying yet, offer the placement for free.

"You want to train your audience to know that this is a newsletter that has ads."

A featured event is the smartest section for this. It gets the most clicks, it's perfect for readers, and you could probably charge a hundred bucks every newsletter for it. I'll admit I haven't put enough effort into selling mine.

How should it look?

Playful and a little sleek. We're not hard news, we're the fun newsletter. We put a lot of effort into Canva, and the silly GIFs people send in text messages get us a lot of compliments.

Almost every email has a white background. Use a slightly different background color and people recognize yours instantly. Keep the logo consistent, and make your section titles the same font as your brand so the branding carries through the whole read. You don't need a designer-level art style on every image.

Three more things I learned the hard way:

• Watch the size limit. Links take up a ton of space, more than the text. For our first month we went over and emails got cut off. Figure out how to stay under it.
• Bring Instagram into the email. We turn an Instagram post, like the best barbecue spots in town, into a GIF that scrolls the photos. That gets far more clicks than "go to my Instagram."
• Use polls as proof. Ask "have you ever gone to an event because you saw it in the newsletter?" and take the answers to businesses to show how engaged readers are.