Mapping Journalism, Francesco Zaffarano – Q&A: How The Economist built one of its most successful newsletters on LinkedIn. For this issue, I spoke with Aaron Coultate, head of newsletters at The Economist. Aaron is responsible for a rich portfolio of newsletters, but there is one I was particularly interested in. One year ago, he worked on the launch of The Economist Week Ahead, the first LinkedIn newsletter published by the London-based paper. The experiment was a big hit and is now the third most-read title at The Economist, with 2.7 million subscribers.

FZ: How many newsletters are you managing right now? AC: We have eleven subscriber-only newsletters and three free for all. Four, if you count our LinkedIn newsletter.

FZ: Why did you add a LinkedIn newsletter to your portfolio? AC: When LinkedIn added the functionality to create a newsletter on the platform, it was a no-brainer for us to launch one, given that The Economist has 13 million followers on LinkedIn. It made sense to tap into that community. We launched The Economist’s Week Ahead in July 2022, and there were a few key things that we wanted to try out with this newsletter…”