Some innovations are so simple it’s almost laughable. At first sight it’s seems strange to have an editor recommend stories from his own newspaper. The whole newspaper itself is a recommendation from the editor, right? Yes, but this is in effect what Frederick Kempe does with his daily free Eurolinks News Alert e-mail newsletter. He picks interesting stories from the WSJ website/newspaper, and adds his own personal introduction. An excellent way of a) attracting new paying subscribers and b) maintaining existing subscribers’ interest in the site. It’s hard to say which of the two is more important, but one could easily underestimate b). Because of the wealth of information on the web, subscribers can soon find that they don’t visit the WSJ so much. So why pay? Kempe’s newsletter is a daily reminder of why you started subscribing in the first place. Registration here. E-mail newsletters are very 1997, but so what, what works works.