Newsletters Aren’t New, But They Are Still Newsletters
It never will not be weird to me that people feel the need to make up new names for old things. Newsletters are not blogletters just because services like Substack have come along; they are newsletters with a fancy archive. It’s also not true that “what most newsletters of this type have inherited from blogs is tone of voice”. Newsletters with a personality and a perspective have existed for a very long time and pre-date blogs. Back in the early days of blogging and even before, I can think of two just off the top of my head that I subscribed to: Red Rock Eater News Service (mentioned here before) and Entropy Gradient Reversals. Most such newsletters had an online archive of one sort or another, although in the early days it might have been accessed via FTP or gopher. EGR ran off of Topica, and so had an easily-used web archive. What something like Substack does is model its lists’ archive pages on blogging’s traditional reverse-chronological format; that doesn’t magically create a new thing, per se. Nor is sending out your blog via email once a day a new thing; blogs as a form often have incorporated “daily digest” emails for quite a long time. Arguably the sort of thing Dave Winer has been doing lately has more claim to some fancy newish term, as what he does arguably could be described as writing his daily newsletter in public, viewing each day as a discrete entity that relates to itself as it goes. My admittedly-biased gut feels like this is what happens when content marketers discover a thing that already existed: they need to rebrand it in order to claim it, because their job and their mentality is to generate hype. It’s just newsletters. They literally pre-date the web, so you can’t hardly suddenly call them weblogs.