Emily Schario, Director of Multimedia Storytelling & Head of Content
March 26, 2025 Case no. 24
Young Readers
How The B-Side delivers daily, hyperlocal news from Boston Globe Media to engage younger audiences
“It’s like we make a milkshake and throw in some spinach,” says Emily Schario, director of multimedia storytelling and head of content for The B-Side, a daily newsletter serving young Bostonians a mixture of local news and things to do, all packaged from the perspective of their "informed friend." With nearly 50,000 subscribers and an open rate of 60%, the newsletters was launched in 2022 as a way for The Boston Globe and Boston.com to engage with new, often younger, audiences. Recently, B-Side added a paid membership option for their “daily dose of local news you actually want to hear.” Schario joins us to talk about the strategy and execution behind B-Side's success story.
Presented by Emily Schario, Director of Multimedia Storytelling & Head of Content, The B-Side
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By Cecilia Campbell
Article Summary
B-Side, a hyper-local newsletter under the Boston Globe, was born out of an internal innovation initiative in 2021. Emily Schario, a journalist from Maine, was hired in May 2022 to build it from scratch. The goal was to engage younger audiences with a free, digestible news product while generating new revenue streams.
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Since launching, B-Side has gained 45,000 newsletter subscribers with a 60% open rate and 46,000 Instagram followers, primarily from Boston’s under-34 demographic. Its success stems from solving three key problems: declining access to reliable local news, overwhelming 24/7 national news cycles, and misinformation from influencers. B-Side offers a friendly, trustworthy, and locally focused news experience through email and social media, avoiding politics and hard crime.
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A team of two produce the newsletter and social content, emphasizing engaging storytelling and punchy video formats. Monetization comes through native advertising and, recently, a paid membership offering discounts at local businesses.
The project has proven that younger audiences will engage with well-crafted local news, and even pay for premium benefits.
How it started
Emily Schario is a 29-year old journalist hailing from Maine. In May 2022 she saw a job posting for a lead writer for a newsletter that didn't yet exist, and got the job. “My job as that person was to essentially create it. There was no name. The only objective that really existed was, we want to do this to go after younger audiences. And then there were obviously the unique revenue goals attached to that. But I guess you could say I was one of the co-founders of B-Side. And from the beginning I played a really big role in figuring out the brand, and exactly what we would cover.”
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What had preceded that May job posting was an internal event at the Boston Globe – Innovation Day, in the autumn of 2021. Essentially, employees get to pitch a business idea and whichever idea gets the most peer support has the opportunity for funding or to get put in front of senior leadership for possible further development. “This happened during a time when we saw a lot of venture-backed media companies like Axios and 6AM City popping up in local markets with local newsletters. The Globe definitely saw this as a space that we could be capitalizing on. But the hope was if we can create this newsletter product, let's go after younger audiences and create some new revenue streams out of that.”
How it's going
Two and a half years after launch, the team is happy with the results. Some numbers:
Newsletter
45,000 newsletter subscribers
60% newsletter open rate, 7% click-through rate
65% of readers are under 34
60% identify as women
85% of readers (polled at sign-up) say top interest are things to do, events, restaurants
Social
46,000 followers on Instagram, 10% engagement rate
35,000 followers on TikTok, 8% engagement rate
Most followers live in Boston + two neighbouring communities
62% of followers are under 34​​
Product
The team’s two top success factors when creating the product:
“Identifying the problems we were solving for”
The team identified three problems this product would be solving for:
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Problem 1: Access to reliable local news is shrinking.
“Small newspapers are closing every year. Plus a lot of young people have never read newspapers or they get a lot of their information on social media. And there may be some budgetary concerns with paywalls.”
Solution: Free newsletter delivered straight into your inbox every moring – no searching.
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Problem 2. The 24-7 breaking news cycle is exhausting.
“Being informed in this day and age is really hard. As a journalist, that's part of my job. But I think a lot of young people are setting more boundaries with their media diet these ways because it can be a lot.”
Solution: Don't cover any national news, politics or hard crime. “There's obviously exceptions to the rule in the midst of a presidential election or if something happens nationally that's having local ramifications. But at its core, B-Side is a hyper-local newsletter.”
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Problem 3. Untrustworthy info from influencers/content creators.
“We're in the influencer economy. And while that's been a boon for young people, and they feel like these people are relatable and they trust them, influencers aren't abiding by any ethical or editorial guidelines or standards. And so there’s a big question mark around who you can actually trust.”
Solution 3: Package social content like an influencer; recognizable formats. “We understand that young people, including myself, watch a lot of content creators and influencer content. So our goal is to walk and talk like one, but we're one that you can ultimately trust.”
“Identifying our North Star Follower”
The Boston Globe brand director got involved to help the team really nail down who they are creating the content for. “She is absolutely fabulous. She had us do this exercise where we had to ask ourselves, if we were only writing this newsletter to one person, what does this one person look like? How much do they make? How old are they? What do they do for fun?”
The Newsletter – every weekday
The B-Side newsletter is about striking a healthy balance of local relevant information and events and things to do, according to Emily. “This newsletter launched at a time when the world was opening up again, and there was this craving for connectivity, whether that was online or in real life. Young people wanted to know, what's the hottest restaurant in town? But they also want to know, are the trains running? Are there any shutdowns they have to be aware of? And it's all packaged in the voice of your informed friend, which I think in a lot of ways is my voice, since I was the one who originally wrote the newsletter.”
The newsletter includes a lead story and four “quick and dirty” headlines and shorter stories. There are eight things to do around Boston in the Monday and Friday editions, plus a One Last Thing section, with “a piece of news that you don't need to know, but you're glad that you did.” The team also always includes a poll, asking readers about their reaction to a story. “It's a really great engagement play, and we'll include the results from every poll at the end of every newsletter.”
B-Side subscribers are asked at sign-up about what topics they are most interested in reading about – this graph shows that things to do is by far the biggest category, with food & drink the second most popular one.
Instagram and TikTok – because that’s where young people are
As mentioned B-Side also has a pretty significant presence on social media. “It would be silly of us to not get into that world, since young people, including myself, get a lot of their information and entertainment from social video.”
To get a feel for the social content, we strongly recommend following B-Side on Instagram or TikTok. There are also lots of vertical videos on the B-Side Youtube channel.
Q&A with Emily Schario
After Emily’s introduction to the background and product, we ran the webinar as an interview. We got nearly 30 questions during this webinar, most of which got answered in the session. We’ll cover most of them here. They have been edited for organisation; I’ve tried to include them by topic.
TEAM, SKILLS & WORKFLOW
Do you do everything yourself? Or do you have a support from the rest of the team?
“My colleague Gia writes most of the newsletter content and I do social media. We also have an editor. We send our Google doc that has the draft of the newsletter to our editor around 4 pm every day. They'll provide any kind of copy edits or content edits, and then they'll do a quality assurance check when we do the actual email tests that evening.”
“But I guess you could say like the editorial director. I meet with Gia every day who is writing the majority of the newsletter these days as I've been kind of shifted into social. She'll pitch me stories – she'll send over the stories that she wants to write about in the newsletter and I'll approve those every day. It’s a small team. There was actually a period with B-side where I was doing it solo for about six months, everything. It was crazy. I'd prefer not to do that.”
What skills are involved in the multimedia production?
"I'm a one woman show for social. My only tool is my iPhone. I film everything on it. I maybe use an external mic, for one or two of every 10 videos – I probably should use it more often. And I edit everything in Premiere Pro or in the app, depending on what the product needs to look like."
"Sometimes, like for the video (clip here) where you saw me on the boat, I happen to have an extra set of hands with me, which I needed that day. I was on that boat for maybe four hours. And then I had to go through all of the footage, pull all the quotes, put the script together. The goal for us is always to have our videos be 60 seconds or less, which is a challenge sometimes."
"And you know, you're fighting for people's attention in their For You page. So we always have a really strong hook, making it clear what the audience is going to see in the first three to five seconds of the video. And we use kind of punchy editing styles that your brain is constantly having to move around, and you're not getting bored. If I have three days in a row where I have nothing else on the calendar, I can produce that. That's not often the case. But but yeah, I love making those though. It's like it scratches my brain in a really fun way."
Where would newsrooms find people like you that do the right things with the right cut and the right vibe for the target group, this one under 30?
"I’m now 29, when I was hired for B-Side I was 26, which In hindsight was crazy. I had been working as a producer for four years prior to that. I think part of the reason that I actually got this job was I was making news TikToks at my former employer that started to take off over my last nine months there. They ended up landing me a New England Emmy nomination, I think I was just in this unique position of having a journalist background, but I was starting to dabble in these new mediums and seeing success."
"I'll also say, you know, a big part of what I do is being on camera and having that on-camera personality, which I think is a lot harder than people think. My parents are both actors and directors and they run a small theater in the town where I grew up. So I've grown up around storytellers my whole life. And while I'm not on stage, I think I'm very much in like a theater adjacent role right now. To your question, you need to find people that have the journalistic standards, but also understand what young people consume. And it should be a young person because they're going to have the clearest sense of what young people want."
AUDIENCE
Does your audience have the option to communicate through your content? If not, is that a problem for them? If you do, then how do you approach the issue of moderation?
"The poll is actually the most frequent way that we engage with our audience. I'm sure a lot of newspapers know the struggle of moderating the comment section on an article. But because this is a newsletter there isn't a consolidated area for people to look at a thread or whatever. Though in our poll section, raters have the option to leave a comment."
"We get a lot of just people replying to the email, whether that's like complimenting the newsletter or making a suggestion. I try to respond to every single reader email. Our readers, I think we have developed a parasocial relationship with us and we with them. It's important for us to maintain that relationship and actually hearing them."
BUSINESS & MONETISATION
What is the goal in terms of growth, and how do you grow the subscriber list?
"The goal is to always continue to grow in some capacity. We have hit or are close to our original goal for subscribers. Year one was all about a proof of concept. Year two was about scaling, which we definitely have. And so now year three, you know, we have this focus on membership, bringing events in real life, and then kind of maintaining the audience that we built online.
We continue to grow the list through email sharing or doing more marketing. It's ultimately like we want to sustain the readers that we have to and make sure they're sticking around. I think on the social side, I would love to see a scale a little bit more."
How do you monetize the content?
"This past month we launched B-Side membership, which is a paid option for newsletter subscribers. For $7 a month or $70 a year, readers get access to over 50 discounts from local businesses – that’s continually expanding. I send a special newsletter on the weekends that's very things-to-do and itinerary focused. And then in April, we do have a few real life events coming up. The goal is to also be outside the inbox this year."
How is the membership effort going? What has been your key learning so far? What discounts are most valued?
"I think there are a handful of discounts where if you use them just once, it pays for the membership. For example, there’s a deal at a local massage parlor where you get $40 off your first massage. If you are searching for an apartment, you can get $300 off the broker fee, which is a unique fee we have to pay in Boston for apartment hunting. But for a lot of the other ones that are more food and drink focused, it could be 10 to 15% off when you get a beer. And we have a dumpling making class that people really love that I think you can get 10 or 15% off on. So the idea is things that can help people connect with Boston on a budget."
What type of advertising do you run?
"It’s mainly native ads, and things like discounts. We don’t really do banners or programmatic ads. For newsletters, it works better when ads feel native and are written in the voice of the newsletter It feels integrated with the product."
Who are your advertisers? And are they coming back?
"A lot of them are local organizations, businesses. We've also had larger brands like DoorDash, but the bulk of them are kind of regional, based in the New England area. At the core, it's all about whether this is a product that is going to serve our Gen Z audience or feel relatable in some way.
We've had a year long deal or a six month deal before, and yes, we definitely have returning advertisers. So companies like Keolis, which runs one of the train systems in Massachusetts, have been in B-side a ton."
Have you been able to move this audience on to other newsletters or other engagement areas?
"We have little data on how many Globe sign-ups have come from B-Side right now. But I think that the benefit of B-Side is, it's certainly raising awareness. Among our readers, some people know that we’re part of the Globe, and some people don't. I think a lot of people when they find out they think “oh my god, I had no idea”. I think for a young reader, it’s an exciting thing to make that connection and it potentially offers a gateway for young readers into the globe in their media diet journey. We're also seeing this as a way to grow a new audience for the Globe in general, especially with these other new unique revenue streams [like membership]."
What is the main KPI that your team focuses on?
"Candidly, my boss is probably better equipped to answer this just since he deals with that data all the time. But of course we’re paying attention to our open rate and click-through rate, since those are things that are communicated with clients and can certainly influence the value of a brand deal. I would also say engagement on social media is a big piece of that. Our social engagement rate is another one of those things that influences deal value. For the newsletter, having that open rate is huge. Having it be 60% two years after launch shows that we have a devoted and consistent audience and can guarantee X amount of impressions for a possible client. Social is a little different just because it's algorithm driven a lot of the time."
Do you think Gen Z will actually pay for content or a service like this?
"I think the membership is the first test of that. I would say the membership is really for the super users of B-Side. These are folks that always open, always click and are consistently engaging with us on social. We launched it maybe about a month ago and we have about 200 paying subscribers, which has been exciting. And you know, it's been growing a little bit every weekend. So there's certainly a cohort that exists there.
So far, I think what we've learned about Gen Z is they will pay for something if they feel like it's worth it. So right now we're in the phase of proving to them that it's worth it."
Have you considered turning it into a podcast?
"You know, it's funny you say that because Gia and myself, like we banter every day and our boss is always like; “we should give you guys a microphone”, which in theory sounds great, but we’d need like two more people to produce a podcast. It's something we maybe could expand into, but it’s a question of staffing. But there's certainly been interest; we've had a few readers reach out."
FINAL REFLECTIONS
What have you learned through this experience so far – both good and bad?
"As for the bad, it's very easy to bite off more than you can chew. At the end of the day, we're a small team of two, so kind of managing expectations of what is possible can be hard. The whole team is really excited about this project and loves it and believes in it wholeheartedly. So I think sometimes our dreams are bigger than what's physically possible given the team size. But we've still managed to put out a tremendous amount of content and that's something I'm really proud of."
"And the good is just seeing the feedback. We created this product, and to see it actually resolve problems for young people. And another piece of this that has been interesting as well, most of our audience are folks under 40, but we also have a handful of folks in their fifties and sixties. The other day I got an email from a guy who was 71 and is a diligent B-Side reader. He said “I may be too old for this product, but I love the voice. I love how funny this is. I love how relatable it is”. I think a lot of those qualities that we are after, I think they transcend age which has been really cool to see."
If you were to start up your own company, how would it be different from the B-side?
"That's a hard question because I think, candidly, a lot of the B-Side is me. When you read the newsletter, that's my voice. In a lot of ways I am the brand. In a way, it's like having the luxury of running the company you've wanted to run, but having the institutional support of the Globe and not having to deal with, like, the hard parts of running a business."
"It's a very vulnerable place to put yourself out on the internet like that and share a piece of your creativity. You're hoping that if people like your work, that probably feels like an extension of, do they like you? That was really scary when we first launched – I'm putting myself out there. And if they don't like the product, maybe it's a “me problem”. But in a lot of ways, this is very much the dream for me."
If somebody wants to create the B side of their town or city, what would be your top tips?
"Really try to figure out what are the problems you're trying to solve. I think we're now the space for newsletters is becoming more saturated too. So I think you need to ask yourself, who exactly is this for? Doing that North Star follower exercise was transformational for us. And figuring out what problems you're trying to solve."
"And if you get halfway through the process and you realize the market is too saturated or something isn't working, it's okay to stop and figure out something different. Part of creating a business or a brand in this way is having the humility to know when you need to put it down. We were lucky enough that there was blank space for us to capitalize on. I think you should be really honest with yourself about who this is for and do those people exist?"
Useful links and contact information
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The webinar presentation can be downloaded here. ​​
​There are LOTS of great videos on the B-Side Youtube channel
Emily Schario can be reached on emily.schario@globe.com. Her LinkedIn profile is here.
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​You are welcome to contact the WAN-IFRA Innovate Local team, if you have questions or examples of similar cases.
Cecilia Campbell: c.campbell@wan-ifra.org
Niklas Jonason: n.jonason@wan-ifra.org