Who doesn’t love free? We have a new feature that I think many people will love, and it’s free. It’s a newsletter that you can customize to the topics of interest to you. If you live in Beachwood, for example, your version of the newsletter would contain anything that publishes on our site that is about Beachwood. Or nearly any other town in Northeast Ohio. Do you want to make sure you never miss our new gardening column? If you choose Home and Garden as a topic, your version of the newsletter will contain anything we write about gardening. Once you choose your topics -- and you can choose from among a bunch -- you’ll start receiving a daily email, shortly before the lunch hour, containing the first paragraph of each story we’ve published in the previous 24 hours about those topics and links to the full stories on our site. The newsletter will include every story on a topic, including those that are exclusively for paying subscribers, but the exclusive stories will be tagged as such in the newsletter. You can skip clicking on them if you are not a subscriber. Or, you could subscribe! Cleveland.com/subscribe This new feature is the work of Jeff Hobbs, the Advance Local director of product management. Jeff was central to our recent Google-funded project to develop tools for mass removal of names from stories through our Right to be Forgotten initiative. He’s been working on customized newsletters as a passion project for a couple of years. He based his work on what readers told us they want to see. We conducted a survey on whether Greater Cleveland residents would like customizable newsletters, and your answer was an overwhelming yes. We also asked you about the preferred cadence and which topics you would like the most. State and local election news ranked number one. Weather was number two. And, in a theme that has been a constant in recent years, the Environment and Nature was third. Cleveland readers keep telling us they want news about the environment. That’s why we made veteran reporter Pete Krouse a full-time reporter on the topic a while back. Filling out the top 10 were: Food, Drink and Recipes; Football; Crime; Communities and Subcultures; Law Enforcement; Campaign and Campaign Finance; and Culture and Tradition. Signing up and choosing your topics is simple at https://www.cleveland.com/customalerts/ One thing to know: when you sign up for news of a city or village, you won’t receive high school sports news. We found that the newsletters filled up with a lot of high school sports news because every story containing a mention of a student from your high school in the standings was included. It was too much. You can, however, sign up for all high school sports news if you wish. In testing so far, people seem to like these newsletters. They join our popular Wake Up newsletter, with all the important news of the previous 24 hours, and Capitol Letter, our Statehouse and politics newsletter. (Sign up for these at https://www.cleveland.com/newsletters.) If you give the custom newsletter a try, please let me know what you think. Thanks for reading. | 