19 Why we need to think about email as community, with Quartz

The Center of Attention

If your inbox is anything like ours, it’s a crowded space but an important one. Email can provide an asynchronous, personal, and curated experience in an environment that offers publishers a degree of control and experimentation. But how do you make your newsletter stand out? Eva Scazzero, Product Manager at Quartz, does it by treating email as a way to build community. “We try the best we can to make it a two way street,” she says of Quartz’s Obsession newsletter, which takes a deep dive into a different topic every day. In the first year, 10,000 individual people wrote in a response to Obsession. Eva talks with us about building reader engagement through email, the first time a reader response made it into a newsletter, and how the constraints of email actually afford opportunities for creativity. Sachin and Andrew discuss the importance of email and user feedback and go +1/-1 on things they’re nostalgic about, like AIM and Blockbuster. Subscribe to The Center of Attention on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.