DESIGN RESEARCH | PRODUCT DESIGN

Growing The Blast

Empowering teams to tell stories.

Chief Creative Officer: Jacob Villanueva

July 2024

Conducted a competitive analysis to support the redesign of The Blast, the Texas Tribune’s premium politics newsletter. Identified gaps, visual patterns, and positioning strategies from peer publications to inform future brand and marketing decisions.

The Blast is a high-value subscription newsletter offering political insights to professionals, lobbyists, and engaged Texans. While its editorial content was sharp, the Tribune team felt the branding and marketing didn’t fully reflect its premium quality.

I was brought in during early redesign conversations to help the team understand how similar newsletters were framing themselves visually, structurally, and strategically. My goal was to identify what felt effective, what didn’t, and where The Blast might carve out its own space.

Methodology

After looking at The Blast User Research and understanding concerns, I looked for similar products on the market. I looked at 13 Premium newsletters: 5 National, 7 on a State level (not all Texas), and 1 City-specific one. I also highlighted one free newsletter that has incredibly valuable research in an engaging format. I looked into costs, affiliations, strengths, and weaknesses.

Highlights + Key Features in Other Products

Following my analysis of each product, several features stood out to me:

  • Punchbowl News: Category/tagging system

    • Briefly introduces topics at the top of the newsletter, and allows reader to scroll to find the section with the most interesting content to them.

  • The Dispatch: Up to Speed

    • Gives readers a quick primer on the latest happenings in government to provide context for the following information.

  • The Dispatch: Notable and Quotable/Within Earshot

    • Gives readers direct quotes from relevant parties

  • The Dispatch: Cutline Contest

    • A really engaging and exciting way for readers to interact with producers of the content. Actual prizes tied to this section of the newsletter.

  • The Texan’s Redacted: Extra Credit

    • Refers readers to external resources if they want to learn more on that issue’s topics.

  • WisPolitics: Today’s Calendar

    • Incentivizes timely reading of issues.

Graphs visualizing how the Blast compares to other newsletters in monthly and annual costs.

Findings + Suggestions

As attention spans dwindle, The Blast needs to be structured in a way that puts the most important information first in an easily digestible format, then encourages subscribers to dig deeper. The Blast already has subsections, but the goals/purpose of each is a bit unclear at the moment. Leading with quick facts and time-sensitive topics will make readers feel that opening the newsletter will immediately provide them with the most essential information, rather than feeling like they have to dig through long blocks of text to get to the things that really matter to them.

There is an opportunity to use images, graphics, and other features to create a more visually driven product. This is something that didn’t really exist in the newsletters I found! There isn’t a need to create a data viz team solely for the newsletter, but giving readers room on the page to rest their eyes while highlighting the most important information is a really valuable consideration. There really isn’t anything like Texas Weekly’s Hotlist, and it might be something worth reintroducing.