Straight answer: No, you generally don't need to italicise newsletter names. Most working style guides treat a newsletter name the same way they treat any other brand name, not as a standalone published work, and the bigger practical issue is that a lot of your readers will never see the italics anyway because plain-text emails strip custom formatting. Pick one rule, write it down, and stop relitigating it every time you mention Morning Brew in a blog post.
Why this question even comes up
It comes up because most of us learned the italics rule from books. Novels get italicised. Magazines and newspapers get italicised. Short pieces inside them, like an article or a chapter, get quotation marks instead. That's the hierarchy most people carry around in their heads from school: big standalone thing gets italics, small thing-inside-a-bigger-thing gets quotes.
A newsletter doesn't fit neatly into either box. Is it a whole publication, like a magazine, which would suggest italics? Or is it more like a brand name, such as Nike or Slack, which nobody italicises? Writers get stuck because a newsletter behaves like both things depending on the day. Morning Brew is a brand. It's also, technically, a recurring publication with issue numbers and archives. Both readings are defensible, which is exactly why the argument never settles itself.
What the major style guides really say
I went back and checked, because I was tired of guessing during client edits.
- AP Style, the one most marketers and journalists default to, doesn't italicise much of anything. It uses quotation marks for titles of books, films, and songs, and leaves most brand and publication names plain. Newsletters aren't addressed directly, but under AP logic they'd sit closer to a brand name than a book title.
- The Chicago Manual of Style italicises titles of periodicals, journals, and other serial publications. A newsletter can qualify if it's treated as a formal serial, but Chicago has never added an explicit newsletter entry, because the format barely existed in its current form when the major rules were last rewritten.
- MLA italicises larger, self-contained works and uses quotation marks for shorter pieces that live inside them. Under a strict MLA reading, the newsletter name might get italics and an individual issue's headline would get quotation marks.
Notice the pattern. None of these guides has ever sat down and said, explicitly, in plain language, "here is what to do with a newsletter name." They're all being extended by analogy. That's an uncomfortable thing for a lot of writers to admit, because it means there isn't a single correct answer waiting to be found. There's a judgement call, dressed up as a rule.
My own rule, and the client who fought me on it
I write a weekly newsletter called The Weekly Experiment. A client of mine, a fintech founder based in Leeds, once sent back a draft I'd written for his blog with every mention of his own newsletter name put into italics, and every mention I'd made of Morning Brew and Lenny's Newsletter left plain. He wanted consistency, fair enough, but he wanted it applied backwards from where I'd have started.
My reasoning, which I explained on the call, was this: I treat a newsletter name as a proper noun and a brand asset, the same tier as a company name, an app name, or a product name. You wouldn't italicise Spotify or Trello in a sentence. I don't italicise a newsletter name either. I use Title Case, I capitalise it as a name, and I leave it at that. No italics, no quotation marks, just the name sitting in the sentence like any other brand.
He kept his italics on his own site. I kept mine plain on mine. Neither of us was wrong, and that's the part most posts on this topic won't say out loud, because it makes for a less satisfying answer than a clean rule. There isn't one clean rule. There's a defensible choice, applied consistently.
The four-question test I use on client calls
When someone asks me to settle this for their brand, I run through four quick questions rather than quoting a style guide at them:
- Is the name doing the job of a publication or a brand? If people subscribe to it the way they'd subscribe to a magazine, lean towards treating it as a serial. If it functions mainly as a marketing asset with a logo and a wordmark, treat it as a brand name.
- Who's the audience for this specific piece of writing? A journal article, a legal document, or an academic paper should probably follow Chicago or MLA and italicise it as a periodical. A blog post, LinkedIn caption, or sales email doesn't need to.
- Does the name already have a visual identity? If your design team has a locked wordmark for the newsletter, italicising it in plain text copy will fight against how it looks everywhere else you show it.
- Where will this text be read? Plain-text emails, most social captions, and a huge number of ESPs will strip italics entirely. If half your sends won't render the formatting, the rule you're arguing about doesn't survive contact with reality.
The number that changed my mind about how seriously to take this
A few years back I spent an idle afternoon, out of curiosity rather than for any client, pulling up fifty mentions of well-known newsletters across major outlets, Forbes, the New York Times, and TechCrunch archives among them. Roughly two out of every three simply capitalised the name and left it plain, no italics, no quotes. About one in five used quotation marks. Only a small handful, mostly in more formal or academic-adjacent pieces, used italics.
That told me something useful: even publications with their own strict internal style guides don't agree with each other on this, issue to issue. If the New York Times and TechCrunch can't land on one shared convention, a small business owner arguing about it in a Slack thread with their copywriter is spending time on something the market has already decided doesn't matter much.
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Where this causes a problem
The real risk isn't picking italics or plain text. The real risk is picking both, at different times, across your own site. I've audited client blogs where the newsletter name is italicised in one post, quoted in another, and left bare in a third, all written within the same month. That inconsistency reads as sloppier than either single choice would on its own, because readers notice pattern breaks even when they can't say why something feels off.
This same inconsistency shows up constantly around adjacent formatting questions. If you're also unsure whether webinar titles should be italicised or how to handle podcast titles in your writing, the same logic applies across all three. Pick a lane for each content type, write it down somewhere your whole team can see it, and stop deciding it fresh every single time someone types a name into a draft.
Newsletter names versus individual issue titles
This is where a lot of the confusion lives, and it's a separate question from the one most people are asking. The newsletter's own name, The Weekly Experiment, Lenny's Newsletter, Morning Brew, is one thing. The title of a single issue inside that newsletter, something like "Why I Stopped Posting on LinkedIn Every Day," is another thing entirely, and it should generally sit in quotation marks the way you'd punctuate a single article title, regardless of what you decide about the newsletter's own name. I've gone into the mechanics of that split in more detail in a separate piece on how to style newsletter titles for email marketers, which is worth reading alongside this one if you're building out a full style guide rather than making a one-off decision.
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If you work in writing or editing, here is what I look for in writing guest posts.
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A simple house rule you can copy today
Here's what I'd write into your own one-page style guide, in five steps, so nobody on your team has to guess again:
- Decide once, in writing, not in a live debate on a client call.
- Capitalise every major word in the newsletter's name, treat it like a brand, skip small connector words like "the" or "of" unless they're part of the official name.
- Never italicise the newsletter name in email body copy, since a large share of your list reads plain text and the formatting won't survive anyway.
- Reserve quotation marks strictly for individual issue titles, not the newsletter's overall name.
- Apply the rule backwards across your existing blog and site, not just going forward, so old posts don't contradict new ones.
If you're building this out as part of a wider content or email programme rather than a one-off blog post, it's worth knowing that a lot
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