Online newsletter grabs your attention with great headlines and clean design

The secret to Web publishing today is simplicity, variety and brevity.

Readers crave news sites that offer a smorgasbord of stories, cleanly presented and designed for that quick read.

Duke University’s Working@Duke electronic newsletter does all of this and more, and is the winner of Ragan’s Employee Communications Award for Best Electronic Newsletter.

It also links readers to its Facebook page and offers fun online polls. Five feature stories are placed “above the fold” and offer quick news and how-to information about Duke.

Nine additional headlines are listed next to the feature stories so readers can quickly navigate around the online publication, which is part of Duke’s external website, Duke Today.

Like it’s sister print publication—which won our print newsletter category—the electronic version of Working@Duke is simply and clearly written with an emphasis on offering the reader a buffet of interesting articles.

At our workshops and conferences, we often tell editors to narrow the gap between their organizational websites and those that dominate the consumer world.

Working@Duke does a good job of moving in that direction.