the perils of putting good stuff out in the insta vacuum

Since last month, the Dallas Morning News has been trying out this thing where they post an “Instagram newsletter” every Friday, and you can see the latest one here.

There are a few ways this is smart: they’re delivering news in a creative format that makes use of Instagram’s nice slideshow feature (ugh remember when every single website used slideshows to juice for clicks, and every other “slide” was an ad and it drove us all berserk??), and we like how they’ve put headlines on the actual images, so that readers can choose to either skim through the pics or read the full caption (Also smart: someone on the social team figured out how to put line breaks in the caption!!! Hello please contact us immediately and um teach us your ways???).

Anyway, we’re all for local news sites making the most out of their social media accounts to reach readers — but here’s the question: it’s one thing to build out a social following and meet your audience where they are, but without being able to easily drive readers to your site/to subscribe (Instagram is notoriously clunky at driving traffic to sites, as anyone who’s ever actually tried to pull that ‘link in bio’ bullshit), there’s not a clear connection between this rather time-intensive effort and your news brand’s bottom line. Also, it’s not like you can sell ad space on the Instagram account, either. So what’s the value of a newsletter that basically exists in the Instagram vacuum? Beats us, but if you’ve got any ideas, hit reply and lmk!!