The Renaissance of the Newsletter and where to find them
In a certain way, newsletters have anticipated what journalism would have become. It was already in existence during the Middle Ages, when travelling merchants moved not just goods but also news. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:
"Traders' newsletters contained commercial information on the availability and prices of various goods and services, but they also could include political news, just as the contemporary financial editor must consider the broader sweep of events likely to influence economic transactions. The commercial newsletter thus became the first vehicle of 'serious' news, with its attempt at regular, frequent publication and concern with topical events generally".
In more modern times, newsletters have become increasingly important for marketing for media outlets worldwide. They are direct-to-consumer advertising, a kind of advertising where publishers promote their products directly to customers. In journalism, newsletters
have been seen as a new channel of communication between media and their readership. Moreover, there was hope, like in medieval times, that word-of-mouth would play a role in generating a different audience. Today, we can see newsletters conceived as a digest of the
media outlets' production sent for free to a list of subscribers who don't even need to open the newspaper's webpage to read the contents. In other cases, newsletters are premium content that is sent only to paying subscribers. In between these two models, many hybrid
and mixed solutions can exist.
In recent years, we witnessed another shift in the newsletters world. In 2017, Substack, a platform for creating personalized newsletters, entered the market, and some journalists started to drop out of big newsrooms to start their own newsletters, trying to bring with them their readers and, at the same time, trying to enlarge their audience. The advantages were several: from thorough freedom in choosing the news to give or the facts to comment on to complete control of the economic aspects of the endeavour. In terms of engagement, an aspect towards which the ENJOI project has been particularly interested, the direct relationship between who produces the news and who reads them enabled a more refined tuning on topics to cover and to enquire about. Coupling one-person-show newsletters and crowdfunding practices can make this relationship even more direct.
Today, though, monetizing from newsletters is not so simple; thus, sustainability is not so easy. Digiday, an online trade magazine for online media founded in 2008, published an article that explored the new trends in monetization. They looked beyond the inbox-based revenues, i.e. the money a publisher gets for the advertisements contained in the newsletters that depend on how many subscribers open the single email. Digiday didn't look expressly at journalism newsletters, but what is clear is that newsletters can be part of a sustainable media endeavour. Robust media companies, in fact, are trying to stay afloat by diversifying their business with other products, from podcasts to social media content.
So, even if Wired told us that the peak of the newsletter was in the 1940s, for some analysts, we are in a golden era for newsletters. Still, more than newsletters alone is needed to be profitable enough to be the only activity of a media company or a single-journalist-turned-a-media-company. Nonetheless, there is a deluge of good science newsletters out there. And here is a selection of five ENJOI team favourites, in no particular order (and only in English).
- The Marginalian
A free weekly digest that comes out on Sunday mornings and offers the week's most unmissable articles on creativity, psychology, science, art and philosophy. - Import AI
A newsletter written by a former journalist who also worked in some Silicon Valley tech companies brings a helpful digest of what happens in the Artificial Intelligence field, both from a company and research point of view. - The Orbital Index
Written by Andrew Cantino and Ben Lachman, it is a concise and technical newsletter covering space science and exploration and related content. - Eleanor's Iceberg
The history & science behind fantasy stories. - Benedict's Newsletter
Benedict Evans is a former technology analyst with over 20 years of experience. His newsletter is a handy catch-up with the latest trends in the tech industry.
