escape from the digital colosseum

To my ladies and dudes running the media out there, consider this Digiday report on The New York Times’ email newsletter success (tl;dr,13 million subscriptions and 50 kinds of newsletters!) the latest sign from the cosmos to invest in some serious newsletter game.

Besides the clear biz-minded point for using newsletters as a sort of gateway drug/medium to becoming a full-fledged paying subscriber, ya girl will also posit here that the ~intimacy of the inbox~ is invaluable, given that social media has --> into a digital colosseum of chaos, and publisher sites are unwieldy at best, ad-soaked at worst. Hence, the (relative) safe space of the inbox, and the potential for creating personal-ish connection.

Take BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen and her TinyLetter, the collected ahp, as a brilliant example. She used her most recent letter to share deeply frank observations from her time reporting in Montana this past month, and leverages the newsletter format so that it all feels like a good friend sharing her honest thoughts — not some navel-gazing media shill. See below:

“Journalism used to be a trade, not the fairly rarified, elite profession it's become today. To be a reporter meant that you knew the town and the people in it and how to write about them in a way that was fair and that tried, as best as it could, to keep power accountable — not that you had (necessarily) gone to journalism school, or college at all. You weren't an elitist writing on a laptop in an office in the sky; you were out talking to people to whom you would then be accountable.

“In the big cities of Montana, there's still a pretty robust newspaper tradition. When three of the large newspapers rescinded their endorsement of Gianforte, it was a very big deal. But outside of those big cities, the local newspapers have either disappeared or gone biweekly/weekly; the chance that a woman living in a town of 5,000 actually knows a journalist, or knows who he is, or knows that he lives in/understands her daily life, is slight.”

Liiiiike, I’m not saying newsletters will singlehandedly clean up media’s current PR issue and make subscription-based revenue models viable, but let’s just remember that global society’s collective takeaway from 2016 was, apparently, that Emails Really Fucking Matter. (Ugh. Too soon?)

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