I have some exciting news to share with you today about the future of The Charlotte Ledger.

Up until now, you’ve known us as a single newsletter, with a business-oriented focus. That’s been going well: Our growth has been steady and ahead of our projections, and we’re the largest local-news newsletter on our platform, Substack.

But we see an opportunity to do more — to give our readers more smart and thoughtful local information, beyond The Charlotte Ledger that you have become accustomed to.

Today, we are announcing two additional newsletters focused on life in Charlotte. The two newsletters are:

Transit Time

Transit Time will be a weekly newsletter about getting around in Charlotte by car, bus, light rail, walking, biking … If you leave your house, you’re going to be interested in this one.

And we’ll cover the city’s transit plan — honestly and fairly — which will be one of the top issues for Charlotte’s future as it’s debated in the next couple years.

The really exciting part about this one is that we are starting it in partnership with our friends at WFAE and UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute. The Ledger will trade off with two excellent and experienced reporters — WFAE’s Steve Harrison and the Urban Institute’s Ely Portillo — to provide smart, in-depth coverage of all things related to Charlotte transit and transportation.

This will be free to anyone who wants it and will come out weekly on Thursdays starting this week. More details here.

Ways of Life

Ways of Life will be a weekly obituaries newsletter that honors Charlotteans who may not have made major headlines, but whose lives provide inspiring, heartwarming or interesting lessons for us all.

The name is a nod to the fact that each of our lives follows a different journey, and our newsletter will bring some of these stories to you. Each week, we’ll have a featured story about a community member we’ve recently lost, combined with a listing of others who have passed and links to their obituaries on funeral home websites and Legacy.com.

Some Ways of Life featured obituaries will be written by longtime Charlotte faith and obituaries writer Ken Garfield.

Like the rest of The Ledger’s family of newsletters, this is not a pay-to-play service: We’re not selling advertising, and we’re not asking grieving families to pay us so that their loved ones can be included. We’re collecting publicly available information and making it available to you, so that you can get to know about the fascinating people who have made Charlotte what it is.

Ways of Life will be available only to paying Ledger members (🔒). It will come out every Tuesday afternoon starting next week. More details here.

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If you’re not a paying member and want to join to receive Ways of Life and the complete versions of our main Ledger newsletter, we welcome you. Previously, we offered full access to one newsletter at a price of $9/month or $99/year. Now, we’re producing three newsletters at that same price — and we have plans to keep growing. Why not join us and thousands of your Charlotte neighbors?

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Putting readers in charge: If you’re an existing Ledger subscriber, we’ve taken the liberty of signing you up for the new offerings available to you — both of them for our paying members, and Transit Time for people on our free list. However, we don’t want to send you emails you don’t want. We believe in letting you control your inbox, and our business model does not rely on spamming you so we can sell ads at higher prices.

It’s easy to opt out of this new offering, or to change your preferences in the future. To do that, you just go to the My Account page on our website and check or uncheck the boxes with the newsletters you want:

Go to 'My Account' page

Incidentally, this is the same page you would use to update your email address or billing preferences.

The usual Charlotte Ledger newsletter will continue as it always has, delivering high-quality news and insights Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and our Weekend Edition continues on Saturdays. We’re excited about growing in a time when many local media companies are shrinking, and we will keep the high standards we have set for our flagship newsletter.

Media innovation: As with many things we do at The Ledger, these additions to our portfolio of newsletters are an experiment. We’re not afraid to innovate. We’re unaware of any playbook or precedent to follow to deliver local information in this way — offering subscriptions to multiple originally crafted email newsletters as the primary way to disseminate information to a local community.

Our platform, Substack, updated its technology to enable running multiple newsletters from a single account only last week. It’s possible our theory is wrong, but we believe people in Charlotte are craving high-quality information about our community and are willing to support it.

A newslettering future? If these newsletters go well, then down the road, we’ll add more on different topics. People have different interests, and we want to be able to serve them. Like a sumptuous buffet, an array of newsletters on different Charlotte topics would allow you to pick and choose what you read — or you can have it all.

The beauty of our approach is that ultimately, readers decide. We don’t create newsletters to serve the interests of advertisers. We create them for you. If you have ideas of what you’d like to see from us, drop me a line.

And if you like what we’re up to, please tell a friend.

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Thank again for reading The Ledger as we work to build a modern local media company and experiment in delivering smart and essential information to Charlotte.

—Tony Mecia, founder, The Charlotte Ledger

P.S. If you receive all of the newsletters, the schedule would look like this:

• Monday: Ledger Business Newsletter

• Tuesday: Ledger Ways of Life Newsletter (🔒 only for paying members)

• Wednesday: Ledger Business Newsletter (🔒 full version only for paying members)

• Thursday: Transit Time Newsletter (in partnership with WFAE and UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute)

• Friday: Ledger Business Newsletter (🔒 full version only for paying members)

• Saturday: Ledger Weekend Edition

➡️ Learn more about The Charlotte Ledger

The Charlotte Ledger is a locally owned media company that delivers smart and essential news through e-newsletters and on a website. We strive for fairness and accuracy and will correct all known errors. The content reflects the independent editorial judgment of The Charlotte Ledger. Any advertising, paid marketing, or sponsored content will be clearly labeled.

Social media: On Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire, CXN Advisory