Goodbye, old RSS feed, there’s a new Daily News Update for New Bern and it’s coming to your inbox at 6 p.m.! It launched on May 2, 2021 and it has all kinds of options to choose from.
We’ve used a simple email system to send the stories of the day to subscribers for 10 years. Google’s Feedburner aggregated our daily stories and produced our emails. It was popular, functional, and free. It served its purpose until last year when we started receiving complaints that the font was too small, links were missing, among other things. We spent countless hours researching and troubleshooting. It was a mystery until we received an email from Feedburner last month. It informed us that the email service would be going away in July. We realized Feedburner was making the changes and we had no control.
We took the leap and purchased an email marketing service. The daily news update has a fresh new look, and we now have an option for local businesses and nonprofits to advertise for a small fee and reach a local, diverse audience. Subscribers aren’t all local, as some of them vacation in New Bern, plan on moving here, or moved away and still want to stay connected. If you’re a reader, don’t worry, you won’t be overwhelmed with advertisements.
Are you wondering why we didn’t pay for an email marketing service last year? We would have if we could afford it. We lost all advertising revenue during the pandemic. We still worked nonstop without pay because we care about our community. Our town was going through a major crisis. The recession of 2008 prepared us to survive during the pandemic and continue to promote nonprofits and businesses even though we lost revenue. We care about our town and we didn’t think it was appropriate to solicit advertisers when they didn’t know how they were gonna stay in business.
Some people noticed our efforts and believed in us. We are very thankful to those of you who signed up for the subscription service. That money helped defray some of the costs for our weekly podcasts.
If you couldn’t handle the ugly emails and unsubscribed, we hope that you’ll consider signing up again. All you have to do is enter your email below and complete the process when you receive a confirmation email.
Let us know how we’re doing. Your feedback is essential to helping you stay informed and helping our community as a whole.
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