How The Bulletin gets made, with Alex Braae

One of New Zealand’s most voracious consumers of local news media joins Duncan Greive to reveal the secrets behind his popular daily newsletter.

Most days Alex Braae starts work at approximately the same time as a dairy farmer. But instead of hopping on a quad bike to go and milk a shed full of cows, he sits down at his computer to read a figurative shed full of news. The end product is just as important to a lot of people’s morning routines as a cold bottle of blue top milk – it’s The Spinoff’s daily newsletter The Bulletin.

Since it started in 2018, The Bulletin has developed a loyal following among its more than 25,000 subscribers by collecting and distilling all the most important stories from across the New Zealand news landscape into a single email that hits inboxes at 7am every morning. But exactly how Alex does it remains a mystery to even his closest colleagues.

He joins The Fold host (and his boss) Duncan Greive on this month’s edition of The Fold to explain the process behind the curation and creation of The Bulletin, discuss the state of New Zealand journalism (as someone who consumes more of it than most) and delve into the obsession with local democracy and minor parties which led him to embark on a Jucy campervan tour of the regions before Lockdown 2.0 hit.

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