Concurrent Newsletters — Association & Executive Publications

The Internet Marketing Association and KCOMM share a principal — the association's founder is also the agency's CEO. Between 2019 and 2024, I produced both of his monthly newsletters concurrently: IMA's member publication, going to a list of 50,000+, and his personal executive newsletter.

Two publications, two audiences, two voices, one production calendar. Roughly 100 issues each across four and a half years, on a fixed monthly cadence.

Sole producer on executive newsletter, where I owned the full chain on every issue — copy and copyedit, layout, asset sourcing, build, QA, scheduling, and send — under concurrent contract engagements with both organizations. For the member newsletter, I worked with agency writers who obtained sponsored content, and organized and tailored each send based on the requirements of the month.

The two publications did different jobs and could not sound the same.

The member newsletter spoke to a broad professional membership: association news, event promotion, member programming, industry updates. Structure mattered more than personality — readers were scanning for what applied to them.

The executive newsletter carried an individual's perspective. Fewer items, longer form, a consistent first-person voice that had to stay recognizably his across every issue rather than drifting toward house-generic.

The primary difference between the two is ownership and focus. The member newsletter sometimes used an official, institutional, and neutral tone that represents the collective body, where the executive newsletter used a more direct, conversational, and personal tone from a named leader.

Running two titles on the same calendar meant the work had to be systematized, not improvised:

A shared monthly calendar with staggered build and send dates around the end of the month, so the two publications never competed for the same production window

Reusable templates per title, so layout was assembled rather than rebuilt each issue

A consistent pre-send check on every issue: link testing, mobile render, subject line and preview text, footer, list and segment confirmation

Asset sourcing and preparation for both titles — imagery, graphics, alt text

50+ consecutive months of on-schedule delivery across two publications, with no missed sends.

The relationship ran six years across both organizations, ending in February 2024 with both newsletters still on their original cadence.

Two titles on one calendar is a scheduling problem before it's an editorial one.

What made it sustainable was deciding in advance what was fixed — template, check sequence, build window — so the only variable each month was the content.

Voice discipline was the harder part: the executive newsletter needed to stay recognizably one person's, which meant editing toward him rather than toward a house style.