FEATURES

Insightful Framing Meets Reader Engagement

The Insight is a newsletter sub-brand and content product published weekly by AllSides. It features distinct editorial-style branding, structured content design, custom-built Mailchimp templates, custom graphics for headers and inline iconography, and a question-based format which creates interaction between AllSides editors and their readers.

A range of custom-designed elements, contained within a brand-aligned visual system, support a freemium subscription news analysis content model.

RESEARCH & IDEATION

Product Differentiation as a Guiding Principle

Focusing on unique value

AllSides’ old premium newsletter suffered from a lack of clear product differentiation — from both competitors and AllSides’ other content. Readers needed to instantly get why they should buy into this new content product, so I focused on crafting something that added clear, unique value for users.

Throughout the process, different stakeholders projected their function-specific mental models onto the project, leading to feature creep and repetition of existing content ideas. I consistently steered the project back towards simplicity and differentiation.

The design also needed to serve the business goal of driving revenues via a freemium model for both free and paid users.

EARLY ITERATION

V1: Balanced Breakfast

Initially, this project called for designing a daily newsletter written by AllSides news editors every morning. Aligning with AllSides’ “balanced news” brand messaging, I named the new newsletter Balanced Breakfast.

By playing with metaphor, Balanced Breakfast linked AllSides’ balanced news content with mental models of good nutrition, positive daily habits, and personal cultivation. Connecting to feelings about civic duty and engagement — key motivators for the “bridging divides” segment of AllSides’ audience — I explored visual elements tied to public service messaging from the USDA and the US National Parks Service. And to emphasize human involvement, I recommended that the author of each edition include a photo of their own breakfast that morning — turning the newsletter into a shared breakfast table at which the reader could feel welcomed.

BRAND & CONTENT DESIGN

Reframing The Insight

Pivot to weekly

At a certain point, project constraints shifted: the newsletter would now release weekly, so the “daily breakfast” metaphor would have to be scrapped. I adapted quickly to the new project requirements, returning to my earlier big-picture brand ideation.

As with Balanced Breakfast, my process included researching users, as well as best practices implemented by competitor newsletters.

Branding The Insight

We called the new direction The Insight, and it would feature balanced insights about a timely controversial issue. I narrowed in on a new metaphor: The Insight would be an informational “brochure” guiding readers through dense, intimidating topics. I nodded to this in the final logomark, in which a tri-fold brochure forms the “S.” To signal to readers that this was a distinct premium editorial product, I gave the full logo a bold editorialized appearance.

Product Positioning & Content Structure

AllSides had a mission to facilitate better conversations about politics, but it did not yet regularly publish content directly helping people talk through tough issues.

Thus, I proposed a new value proposition: The Insight would prepare readers to 1) construct their own informed opinions about issues and 2) have productive conversations about them with anyone across the political spectrum.

The initial iterations used 8 recurring sections, including historical context, conversational best practices, key questions, and reader feedback.

However, I soon realized this was too much content for a newsletter. Furthermore, some early user testers felt paragraphs needed to be broken up and some conversational advice came across as patronizing.

To solve these problems, I reframed the newsletter around reader-submitted questions, thereby integrating the feedback section throughout the content. Structurally, I rearranged the contents to create a three-card structure: an intro card, a free-tier card with two question sections, and a paid-tier card with two question sections, a conversation guide section, and a section featuring AllSides' AllStances™ content.

IMPLEMENTATION

Ongoing Support

Results

The first issues of The Insight hit inboxes in January 2026, with 18,000+ opens, an open rate of up to 27.4%, and bounce rates under 1%.

Implementation & Marketing

Ultimately, the core “product” of a newsletter is not the branding, the structure, or even the finely-finessed Mailchimp template — it’s the trust readers have that something will show up in their inbox on schedule, and that it’ll be worth reading.

To support that trust, I created an implementation guide and other materials to empower the writers, editors, and producers of The Insight to publish an outstanding newsletter each week. This included troubleshooting unexpected Mailchimp issues with edits to the newsletter's HTML code.

Content Structure II

Over the first months of shipping The Insight to subscribers' inboxes, I worked with the editorial team to adjust the content design and reposition the newsletter in relation to the rest of the content offering, including new dialogue event series.

I also brought The Insight in line with other flagship newsletter designs, so that the whole offering presented a united face while retaining The Insight's unique "premium" design.

REFLECTIONS

Designing for Scale

Unlike past projects for AllSides, where my individual contributor role shifted focus from project to project, this newsletter was an opportunity to test out standards that could be applied across the brand's content stack.

The key unlock here was using design to scale and empower others' work. It wasn't about the design itself, but about how that design could be standardized and templatized for non-technical and non-designer team members.