The Personal Newsletter Isn’t a Fad—and You Can Easily Unsubscribe
It’s weird that Medium, of all outlets, published a takedown of personal newsletters, isn’t it?
I don’t really listen to a ton of podcasts. With the exception of a couple relevant to my career path, like Reply All and This Week in Tech, it’s just not my thing, in part because I find the chatter of discussion hard to listen to when I’m writing, and when I’m traveling, I stick to music most of the time. It’s basically the same reason that, when my wife is watching TV, I go into the other room or put on noise-cancelling headphones, because I find spare chatter distracting when I’m trying to write.
But I get why podcasts matter. And why people might find them appealing. A good friend of mine listens to so many podcasts where it’s literally just people talking about movies and TV. For him, they are an important part of his media diet.
I’m more a words guy. I read probably 100,000 words a week, easy, between all the sources I read. I will devote my time to New York Times stories, trade publications, personal blog posts, newsletters, and long magazine features. I also write a lot—roughly 10,000 words between my day job, my newsletter, and my different freelance gigs.
I understand the importance of having an outlet for your words. And, as it turns out, the outlet I found was via a newsletter. For the past four and a half years, I’ve run a newsletter about obscurities called Tedium. Now, my newsletter is a mixture of my personal interests, history, storytelling, and traditional reporting. It’s very long—the average issue has about 2,500 words.
I have put a lot of work into this newsletter, and have spent time trying to learn about how to better send and distribute emails. When it was clear that Tedium would have more than a few hundred readers, I took the step of coming up with a custom solution to get away from the high cost of MailChimp. I’ve also designed my own template, and have spent long weekends fixing bugs. There was one time that a reader let me have temporary access to his personal Comcast email account because of a bug that only affected Comcast email accounts. (Turned out it was a weird quirk of how I copied and pasted the raw HTML of my email!)
It also has a business model. I sell sponsorships against it, and have a Patreon that does OK for itself. It’s not a full-time job, but it’s more than a hobby at this point. It’s led to syndication and freelance work, and it’s helped strengthen my own writing and research skills. I put my homework in when I first got started and I’m now reaping the benefits of that early groundwork.
But I have to wonder how I might have felt about doing it had I run into a take like this in late 2014. Would I, after a spark of inspiration, have been so quick to run back to my apartment so I could register the Tedium domain name as quickly as I could?
I mean, it’s entirely possible that I might have seen such a take. Newsletters, personal or otherwise, have been around for decades. There are some, like Randy Cassingham’s This is True, that date to 1994 or earlier. They aren’t a fad. They predate the web. They are the original medium that gave no control to any other gatekeeper—not Facebook, not Twitter, not even AOL. People have been trying to put a fork in the digital newsletter as long as there’s been a consumer-facing internet.
When I read this take on newsletters, I felt that it was fairly unfortunate, especially on Medium, a website where lots of amateur writers got their start and publish in hopes of getting an audience for their words and thoughts. I should know—I was writing pieces on Medium way back in 2013, when it was still an invite-only service.
It fails to understand a lot of aspects about newsletters, including the fact that there are many types out there, and lots of them aren’t just link roundups. It also misses the point that email is literally the opposite of writing things so somebody else can get paid. If you do it right, it can be an extremely powerful way of having control over your editorial destiny, because it’s a direct connection between writer and reader.
Look, I get it, it’s fun to write a takedown of something that’s popular. I’ve written more than a few in my day. But generally, when I try to write them, I try to punch up.
This punches down. It discourages people from creating and using their own voices—especially diverse voices that have been underserved by traditional outlets and may struggle to find a way in through the front door. And it’s a point that could easily translate to any other type of writing medium.
Imagine reading a piece titled, “The Book Fad Needs To End,” based on a person walking into Barnes & Noble and only finding a few books that were interesting enough to pick up.
Sounds silly, doesn’t it? That’s effectively what this piece does for newsletters. And it’s unfortunate that it got published on one of Medium’s professional outlets, because so many of the points that could be made about newsletters could also be made about Medium.
How about this: If you’re not into newsletters, don’t read them. Just like I don’t listen to many podcasts. Simple enough, right?
Ernie Smith is the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. You’ve possibly run into one of my pieces on Motherboard, Atlas Obscura, Popular Mechanics, The Outline, or Neatorama.
