The short version: Treat your newsletter’s name like the title of a standalone publication and italicise it in body copy, but skip the italics in subject lines, headers, and anywhere the email client might strip formatting anyway. Most style guides (AP, Chicago, MLA) agree newsletters count as periodicals, so they get the same treatment as a magazine or journal title. The bit nobody tells you: italics render unreliably across email clients, so the “correct” grammar rule sometimes has to bend to what Outlook shows your reader.
Next step on this topic: What a Good Blog Post Should Always Include.
The rule, stated plainly
Newsletter titles get italicised in running text, the same way you’d italicise The New York Times or Wired. So if you write “I read about it in Morning Brew” or “our own newsletter, The Weekly Experiment, covers this every Friday,” the newsletter name is italicised because it’s the name of a recurring publication, not a one-off article or a casual mention.
That’s the rule in a single sentence. Most people asking this question already suspected as much and just wanted confirmation before they sent 40,000 emails with the wrong formatting. Fair enough. But the rule has edge cases, and the edge cases are where email marketing specifically diverges from print or web style, which is the part worth reading for.
What the major style guides say
I checked three of them because I didn’t want to give you my opinion dressed up as a rule.
- AP Style (used by most news outlets and a lot of B2B marketing teams) doesn’t italicise at all, technically, because AP was built for print wire copy where italics didn’t transmit reliably. AP puts periodical titles in quotation marks instead: “Morning Brew” rather than Morning Brew. If your company follows AP style for blog content, your newsletter name should go in quotes, not italics.
- Chicago Manual of Style (the one most publishers, book editors, and long-form content teams default to) treats newsletters as periodicals and italicises them, same category as magazines and journals.
- MLA, used mostly in academic writing, also italicises periodical and publication titles, which includes newsletters.
So the honest answer is: it depends which style guide your brand has quietly picked, whether anyone told you or not. If nobody at your company has ever said “we follow AP” or “we follow Chicago,” you don’t have a house style, you have a habit, and habits drift. I’d bet money that if you pulled the last 20 blog posts from most mid-sized marketing teams, you’d find newsletter titles italicised in some, quoted in others, and in plain text in the rest. Nobody notices because nobody’s checking, which brings me to the part people skip over.
A short story about my own newsletter’s name
When I relaunched my weekly newsletter a couple of years back, I called it The Weekly Experiment, and for about four months I wrote it four different ways across my own content: sometimes italicised, sometimes in quotes, sometimes just capitalised with no formatting at all. Nobody complained. Not one subscriber, not one client, not one colleague. It took me finding my own inconsistency in a content audit, three blog posts in a row, three different treatments, to fix it.
That taught me something useful: readers don’t care about this nearly as much as writers do. What they notice is whether your subject line made them open the email and whether the content inside was worth their four minutes. Formatting consistency matters for your own credibility and for anyone auditing your content later (an editor, a new hire, future you), but it is not a subscriber-facing problem in the way we sometimes convince ourselves it is. I still fixed it, because sloppy formatting compounds across hundreds of posts and starts to look like carelessness in aggregate, even if no single instance gets noticed.
The practical rule I now give clients
When I’m working with a marketing team on their content style (this comes up more than you’d think, right alongside questions like whether webinar titles should be italicised, which follows the same logic), I give them a four-step test:
- Pick one style guide and write it down. AP or Chicago, doesn’t matter which, but put it in your brand’s content guidelines document so the next writer doesn’t have to guess.
- Apply it to your own newsletter name first. If you’re Chicago style, italicise it every time it appears in a blog post, guest post, or case study. If you’re AP, quote it.
- Check how it behaves in the actual send. This is the step almost every style guide skips, because style guides were written for print and web, not for HTML email rendering across 30 different clients.
- Default to plain text in subject lines and preheaders, always. Subject lines don’t support styled formatting reliably across inboxes, and italics in a subject line reads as a rendering error to most readers anyway, not as a stylistic choice.
Why italics can quietly break inside an actual email
This is the bit that most grammar-focused advice on this topic never mentions, because it’s written by copyeditors, not by people who’ve built and sent an HTML email. Italics in the body of an email are usually fine in Gmail, Apple Mail, and most modern clients that render HTML. But:
- Plain-text versions of your email (which some subscribers still receive, either by choice or because their client defaults to it) strip italics entirely. Your carefully italicised newsletter name just becomes plain text, no formatting at all.
- Some older or stripped-down email clients, and a meaningful chunk of corporate Outlook setups still running on Word’s rendering engine, handle emphasis tags inconsistently, especially inside tables, which is how most email templates are built under the hood.
- Screen readers announce italics differently depending on the client and the reader’s settings, so accessibility-focused teams sometimes avoid relying on italics to carry meaning at all, and use bold or quotation marks instead, which read more reliably out loud.
None of this means don’t bother. It means don’t treat the italics as load-bearing. If your newsletter’s name needs italics to be understood as a title (rather than, say, a random word in a sentence), you’ve probably got a naming problem, not a formatting problem. A newsletter called “The Weekly Experiment” is legible with or without italics. A newsletter with a name that could be mistaken for a regular sentence, something like “Grow” or “Focus,” benefits from the italics doing some disambiguation work, and that’s exactly the case where inconsistent rendering across clients becomes a real (if small) problem.
Quotation marks vs italics vs bold vs nothing
Here’s how the four options behave and when each one makes sense:
- Italics: correct under Chicago and MLA, reads as “this is a title,” but unreliable in plain-text emails and some older clients.
- Quotation marks: correct under AP style, renders identically everywhere because it’s just punctuation, no formatting dependency at all. This is the safest choice for anything email-specific.
- Bold: not grammatically standard for titles under any major style guide, but it’s what a lot of email marketers use anyway because it renders reliably and draws the eye, which matters more to them than being technically correct. I see this constantly in marketing blog content and I understand why, even though it’s not “right.”
- No formatting, just capitalisation: the weakest option grammatically, but honestly the most common in the wild, because most people writing about their own newsletter never look up the rule in the first place.
If you want one piece of advice that will hold up across every context, in email and out of it, use quotation marks. They’re correct under AP, they render identically in every email client and plain-text fallback, and they read clearly to screen readers. Italics are prettier and technically preferred by Chicago and MLA, but if you’re optimising for reliability across an email list of any size, quotation marks are the boring, correct, unglamorous answer.
Where this fits into your wider content style
If you’re building out proper brand guidelines for your marketing content (and if you’re running any kind of consistent newsletter operation, you should be, because it saves every future writer and freelancer hours of guessing), the newsletter title question is a small piece of a much bigger decision about how you handle titles generally: webinar names, ebook titles, podcast episode names, course titles. Get the underlying logic right once (recurring publication equals periodical treatment, one-off piece equals quotation marks) and you can apply it everywhere without relitigating it every time you sit down to write. It’s the same reasoning that applies to the webinar title question, which is really the same rule wearing a different hat.
And if you’re still building out the newsletter itself, the formatting question is one of the smaller decisions on the list. Subject line, send time, segmentation, list hygiene, and actual content value all move the needle far more than whether your newsletter’s name has a squiggle under it. I’d rather see a marketer spend an extra hour on their welcome sequence than on this. If you want the fuller picture of what drives newsletter performance, our complete guide to email marketing covers the parts that move open rates and revenue, which this doesn’t.
A quick checklist before you standardise
- Pick AP or Chicago and write the choice down somewhere your whole team can see it.
- Apply italics (Chicago) or quotation marks (AP) to your own newsletter name in every blog post, guest post, and media mention going forward.
- Never italicise in subject lines or preheader text.
- Check your plain-text email version and confirm the newsletter name still reads clearly without formatting.
- Don’t rewrite five years of back catalogue content to fix this. Fix it going forward and move on.
Frequently asked questions
Should I italicise my newsletter’s name in a subject line?
No. Subject lines don’t reliably support HTML formatting across email clients, and italics in a subject line often just displays as broken code or gets stripped entirely, so keep subject lines in plain text.
Is it wrong to put a newsletter title in quotation marks instead of italics?
No, it’s correct under AP style, which many marketing and news organisations follow, and quotation marks have the added benefit of rendering identically across every email client and plain-text version.
Does it matter if I’ve been inconsistent with this in past content?
Not urgently. Pick a rule now, apply it going forward, and only fix old content if you’re already doing a broader content audit; readers notice inconsistency far less than writers assume.
What about newsletter names that include a subtitle, like “The Weekly Experiment: Marketing Notes”?
Treat the whole thing as one title and apply the same formatting rule to the entire phrase, colon and subtitle included, rather than italicising or quoting only part of the name.
