The Skimm

About The Skimm

The Skimm (styled theSkimm) is an American media company that delivers the day's news as a conversational daily email newsletter aimed primarily at millennial women. Founded in 2012 by former NBC producers Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, the company built its audience with The Daily Skimm, a free newsletter that summarizes top news stories in plain, witty language designed to be read in minutes each morning. The brand grew into a multi-product media business with millions of subscribers, podcasts, and a calendar app before its acquisition in March 2025 by Everyday Health Group, the health-content arm of Ziff Davis. Its newsletters and site remain available at theskimm.com.

Founding by two NBC producers

The Skimm was started in 2012 when Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin left their jobs as producers at NBC to build a newsletter they wrote, in the early days, from the couch. The two friends had met while studying abroad in Rome and reconnected at NBC's Peacock Productions in New York, where both worked as associate producers on news programming. They had noticed that many of their peers — smart, busy young women — avoided traditional news because they found it dense, jargon-heavy, and disconnected from their lives. The Skimm was their answer: a daily email that recast current events in conversational language, added broader context, and broke stories into easily digestible pieces.

The Daily Skimm formula

The Daily Skimm, the company's flagship product, is a morning newsletter that distills the day's most important stories into a quick, readable format. Each edition explains what happened, why it matters, and what to say about it at the office, using a tone that is informal without being unserious. The product is marketed to urban women aged 22 to 34, though its readership has always been broader than that demographic. As of November 2016, the newsletter had more than 4 million subscribers; by October 2018, the company said it had surpassed 7 million subscribers across its offerings. The Skimm's signature style — headlines rewritten as friendly explainers, news jargon translated into everyday speech — became one of the most imitated formats in the newsletter industry.

Early growth and fundraising

The Skimm's subscriber growth made it a darling of venture investors in the mid-2010s. In June 2016, the company raised $8 million in Series B funding led by 21st Century Fox, with participation from early backers RRE Ventures, Homebrew, and Greycroft Partners. The round was earmarked for a move into video with the launch of Skimm Studios. Additional investment followed from The New York Times and other strategic backers. On March 15, 2018, the company raised a $12 million funding round led by Google Ventures, with participation from Spanx founder Sara Blakely. The fundraising gave the founders the resources to expand well beyond the core newsletter into a diversified media business.

Skimm Studios and video

With its Series B capital, The Skimm launched Skimm Studios in 2016 as its video production arm, part of a broader industry push toward video content. The studio produced short video series and explainers aimed at the company's audience of young women. The video expansion reflected the same bet many digital publishers were making at the time — that video would unlock new advertising revenue and deeper engagement. While video never became the company's primary business, Skimm Studios demonstrated the founders' ambition to build theSkimm into a full-fledged media brand rather than a single-product newsletter.

Election coverage and voter registration

The Skimm made a deliberate effort to turn its audience's news consumption into civic engagement. In the fall of 2016, the company interviewed 12 of the major candidates for U.S. president and ran a nonpartisan campaign that registered 110,000 people to vote in the 2016 election. The initiative, known as Skimm Your Ballot, provided state-by-state voting guides written in the company's accessible style. The founders emphasized that the company's political coverage would remain nonpartisan, a deliberate choice in an era when many female-focused brands were taking explicit political stands. The Skimm's leaders argued that their mission was to inform rather than to persuade, and that staying neutral allowed them to reach readers across the political spectrum.

Product expansion: apps, podcasts, and commerce

Over the years, The Skimm expanded into a suite of products beyond the flagship newsletter. In 2016, it launched Skimm Ahead, an iOS app that inserted newsworthy events directly into subscribers' calendars, offered as a monthly subscription. The company built a "Skimm'bassador" program with 20,000 members who promoted the brand in their communities, and it experimented with ecommerce partnerships, including a curated wine selection that proved popular with readers. In 2019, the company acquired the texting platform Purple, adding text-message distribution to its toolkit. The brand eventually offered six newsletters, three podcasts — including the career-focused 9to5ish, co-hosted by the founders — and a mobile app, employing around 250 staffers at its peak.

Acquisition by Everyday Health Group

In March 2025, six years after acquiring the texting platform Purple, The Skimm was acquired by Everyday Health Group, the health-content arm of Ziff Davis. The acquisition brought the millennial-focused news brand into a portfolio of health and wellness properties, reflecting Ziff Davis's strategy of building digital media businesses around high-value audience segments. The founders, Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, remained the public faces of the brand through the transition. The deal marked the end of the company's run as an independent venture-backed startup and the beginning of a new chapter as part of a large publicly traded digital media conglomerate.

Editorial philosophy

The Skimm's editorial philosophy has always centered on respect for the reader's time and intelligence. The founders' insight was that young women were not disinterested in news but were underserved by news products that assumed deep prior knowledge and unlimited attention. Every edition of the Daily Skimm is built around context: stories include background explanations, definitions of technical terms, and clear statements of why a development matters. The tone is conversational and occasionally playful, but the underlying reporting discipline is conventional. The company has maintained a commitment to nonpartisan coverage, positioning itself as a neutral explainer in a polarized media environment.

Audience and community

The Skimm's audience is one of the most clearly defined in digital media: millennial women, particularly urban professionals in their twenties and thirties. The company cultivated a strong sense of community around the brand, with readers who identify as "Skimm'rs" and a brand ambassador program that turned subscribers into evangelists. The newsletter's high engagement rates were frequently cited by the founders as evidence that the format worked — readers not only opened the emails but forwarded them, discussed them at work, and used them as their primary source of daily news. At its height, the company counted more than 7 million members across its products.

Influence on the newsletter industry

The Skimm was one of the pioneering companies of the modern newsletter boom, demonstrating years before the Substack era that a daily email could be the foundation of a major media business. Its success inspired a wave of imitators and established the conventions of the conversational news digest: the friendly subject line, the "here's what you need to know" framing, the translation of policy jargon into plain English. The company's growth also proved the commercial value of building a direct relationship with readers through email, a lesson that became industry orthodoxy as publishers sought to reduce their dependence on social-media platforms and search algorithms.

Reading The Skimm today

The Skimm's newsletters and site continue to operate under Everyday Health Group ownership at theskimm.com, where readers can sign up for The Daily Skimm and the company's other newsletters. The brand's podcasts, including 9to5ish, remain available on major podcast platforms. For readers who want a quick, conversational briefing on the day's news without the commitment of a full newspaper, The Skimm remains one of the most established and recognizable options in American digital media, more than a decade after two NBC producers decided to write the news the way they wished someone had written it for them.