I Am 7 Days Old on Newsbreak and Already Have 53000+ Impressions!

A little background: When I first joined Medium in February NewsBreak was big news. As a newbie writer trying to get her sea legs, I couldn’t help reading article after article about how the Medium bigwigs were trying to hop onto this new ‘cash cow’ so to speak — $1000 payouts, whaaat?!!💰💰💰😲

Back then requirements were quite stringent and many talented writers who applied to be part of their Creator Program were turned down.

For those of you who are not familiar with NewsBreak, it is a popular news app that people can download to their devices. The app highly favors local news stories and allows users to input their area (currently local to the US) and receive updates on stories that are relevant to the area in which the user lives. You can also access it on your computer at newsbreak.com.

Some interesting things about NewsBreak.

40 million monthly visitors

12 million active daily users

Most downloaded news app according to Google Play and Apple App store

The requirements of joining NewsBreak as a contributor have undergone changes over the past several months. And along with it went the guaranteed base pay😞

Recently, I read an article by Medium writers Jenn Leach and Burk about their experiences with NewsBreak which inspired me to give it a go.

Surprisingly I found it relatively easy to sign up to be a creator.

As many of you know, I am a personal story writer but this time I wanted to try something completely different which is local interest stories. I also know many Medium writers who are successfully repurposing their Medium content over there and might follow in their footsteps down the road.

My third story has the most impressions. It is about what happened when the pandemic pet adoption bubble burst and the animal shelters found themselves overwhelmed. This led to the special fee waiver pet “adoptathon” initiative in order to encourage more pet adoptions and thus reduce overcrowding.

💵So what does this all mean for me earnings-wise?💵

Unfortunately, I can only be eligible for monetization after I publish 10 stories and obtain 100 registered followers. So until that time, no dinero.

I could insert this emoji😩 to express my feelings about that but instead, Imma put this one right here 🥰 because:

I got to write about something close to my heart — pets🐶

Raise awareness about these issues

Try a style of writing I’ve never attempted before.

In her article for DataDrivenInvestor, Christina M Ward has given some helpful tips on how to achieve success on NewsBreak for those who are just starting out:

Titles are everything: Work on it until you can come up with a juicy title that readers cannot resist clicking on. Good titles = click to read =🎊

Articles that do well range from controversial (be advised, NewsBreak is fairly conservative in materials and they do not want articles that contain too much sex or nearly any expletives. Your articles could be rejected if they are more than PG-13-ish material) to local news and local interest stories. Also, articles that push people to emotionally react have a great propensity for viral reading and sharing.

Christina goes on to talk about how she is enjoying the investigative journalism angle she is pursuing on NewsBreak — “ Just this week, I’ve interviewed several people in my community for Newsbreak stories and it’s like having your own mini-newspaper.”

🌸If you’d like to hop onto my NewsBreak page and give me, Yana Bostongirl, a follow then go for it!👍😀 You can also see what I’ve published thus far. They are brief but impactful stories so won’t take up too much of your time😊

Originally published on Medium