I’m pleased to announce that we’re revamping our e-newsletter service at HousingWire.com—making changes designed to keep up with the demands of our readers and an ever-evolving marketplace.
The changes we’re making, in a nutshell:
- We are introducing HW Intel newsletters in four key market segments: Lending, Servicing, Investments and Real Estate
- The HW Morning Radar newsletter is being discontinued
- The HW Daily Update newsletter is moving back to its former once-per-day format
If you’re already registered with HousingWire.com for our email newsletters, you’ll notice some changes to your account:
- If you’d subscribed to Morning Radar, your subscription has been transferred to HW Intel for the market segment identified in your user profile
- You can add additional market segments by visiting the Newsletters section of your user profile
If you haven’t yet set up a free account at HousingWire, you can sign up today and select from our new HW Intel offerings for free, along with our other email newsletters.
Why are we making these changes?
Over the past few months, we’ve taken a close took a look at what information our readers value most, and some clear trends emerged.
First, readers value the enterprise news content that has long defined HW as a business publication. As one reader put it: “HousingWire gets it first and gets it right, [Competitor X] follows a day later, and [Competitor Y] is too politically correct.” (I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to which competitors this reader was referring to.)
Second, we heard about how difficult it is to keep up with an avalanche of industry information. To know what’s going on, industry professionals told us they often needed to read 4, 5 and sometimes many more publications just to keep abreast with whatever they defined as “their” industry.
These two insights challenged our thinking, and led us to revamp our newsletter offerings—and, indeed, our entire newsroom—to better meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of industry professionals, no matter which segment of the U.S. housing economy they call their own.
Say hello to HW Intel. These new, free newsletters aggregate key news stories relevant to a specific industry vertical, and are sent circa 3pm each business day. Initially, we’re rolling out four flavors of HW Intel, each specific to a given department: Lending, Servicing, Investments, and Real Estate.
What’s important to know here is that this isn’t a machine blindly and automatically rolling up content. We’ve tasked our reporters and editors with personally curating the best of the best. They’re doing the reading for you, in a manner of speaking, so that overwhelmed industry professionals like you don’t have to. No longer will you have to read 5 different websites to get a feel for what’s trending in a specific industry segment of interest to your business.
With HW Intel, we’re also challenging a trade press that rarely, if ever, acknowledges a competing media outlet. If a media competitor runs a news story that isn’t covered by HW, or if an op-ed runs elsewhere that is noteworthy and worth reading—it’s part of that day’s Intel newsletter.
Putting the interest of our readers first means rising above what I see as counterproductive industry media practices. I’m glad that with HW Intel, HW is leading the charge to put at least one of these practices where it belongs: in the past.
HW Morning Radar is being discontinued, effective today. Our content curation efforts are expanding and shifting over to our HW Intel products, obviating the need for a separate curated newsletter that effectively does the same thing without industry specialization. Pretty simple.
HW Daily Update is moving back to once per business day. When we first launched HousingWire five years ago, we offered a once-daily newsletter—starting Monday, we’re headed back to once-daily instead of the twice-daily HW Update newsletter we’ve sent for the past two years, because the market has changed. The HW Update email will now be sent each business morning, highlighting key reporting from HousingWire’s award-winning team of journalists.
Six years ago, trade media in this space was dominated by a few “old school” media players content to primarily push weekly and monthly print products. The financial crisis changed all of that: it created demand among industry participants for immediate information about housing and mortgages, and drove home a realization that U.S. housing markets are critical to the very fabric of our national economy.
This explains why the general business press has since swarmed into housing and housing finance in the wake of the crisis—and the result is that amount of coverage about housing and mortgages today that’s out there dwarfs the level of information that existed even just five short years ago.
With the newsletter product changes we’re announcing today, we’re refocusing our journalists on driving the kind of exclusive, market moving reporting that truly exists nowhere else, and we’re also giving them permission to be part of the conversation taking place industry-wide—no matter where that conversation happens to be.
Join us. Make sure you’re registered with HousingWire.com, and if you already have, make sure you sign up for an HW Intel newsletter!
