Annual Report to our Subscribers

February 1, 2018

DailyChatter’s second birthday is coming up next month. It’s a fitting moment to start a new tradition of sending an annual report on our progress to you, our subscribers. Here are some of the highlights of the past year:

• Subscribers to the newsletter have grown six fold and now total close to 7000. You come from big cities and small towns all over America and from quite a few countries around the world.
• We have a very engaged and satisfied readership. You open the newsletter at exceptionally high rates. Forty percent, on average, open every day and there are many of you who open the newsletter 50%, 70%, and 90+% of the time. Those are blockbuster results in the media and publishing industry where the average open rate for newsletters is 16%.
• We’ve remained faithful to our pledge of being totally non-partisan and independent. With constant reports about the invasion of false information into social and other media channels, DailyChatter remains a bastion of trustworthy, carefully sourced information.
• We’re forging partnerships with daily newspapers to broaden DailyChatter’s reach and to increase our subscriber base. We pioneered that right here in our home-town with an agreement with The Boston Globe, an outstanding newspaper perhaps best known to many of you around the country for its starring role in the Oscar winning move “Spotlight”. The Globe is offering its readers a chance to sample DailyChatter for two months, and the results have been outstanding. We’ll be rolling out other newspaper partnerships in coming weeks and months.
• We’re also very proud of our new public service effort to provide free subscriptions to college and university students in this country and selected international universities. This is our pilot year and we’ve partnered with 12 schools including Tufts University, the University of Oklahoma, Xavier, and Brown. Some 1,200 students are already enrolled in the program. Our goal is to reach a majority of US college students over the next five years, helping these young people to know the world better. I can’t think of a more important way to contribute to our collective future than by giving young people more resources to be better informed about the world they’ll be leading.
• Finally, I am grateful for a terrific editorial team that’s making it possible for us to fulfill our core mission to help all of you know the world better. We wrote about an amazing 122 different countries in 2017 in every region of the world, and provided depth and perspective on many important places that are seldom written about.

Journalism has become an incredibly challenging and difficult business so despite all of this good progress, we still have miles yet to travel before reaching our goal of being a strong, self-sustaining enterprise. But our movement in that direction is very encouraging and I want to thank all of you for your support.

I am closing with a few lovely quotes from subscribers that have arrived in our mailbox in recent weeks. Thanks again for your loyalty and support.

With my best wishes, Phil Balboni, CEO, Founder and Co-Executive Editor, DailyChatter

Some closing words from our subscribers:

“You continuously provide unique insight and background information on important – and often overlooked – issues and places in our increasingly complex world.”

“I read your material every day, forward pieces often and am thankful for honest reporting.”

 “The combination of brevity, clarity and detail is indeed something to be treasured in these current times.”