THE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR OF NEWSLETTERS at The New York Times, Adam Pasick, sounded a bit embarrassed as he added up the newsletters that he subscribes to through Substack. “About 75,” he told me. Then there’s the nearly 50 newsletters published by The Times, and surely dozens more that he reads from other outlets.
You might be struggling with an overcrowded inbox, too. With so much of social media in flux, journalists are growing dependent on delivering the news via email. The upsides are thrilling, but there must also be a point of diminishing returns. When—if they haven’t already—will readers reach capacity? And as readers become choosier about what to open and what to delete (or unsubscribe from), how can worthwhile journalism stand out?
It occurred to Betsy Morais, my editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, that contemporary newsletter-writing has a lot in common with blogging from the 2000s. Writers can be more casual and conversational, free to grapple with questions instead of only providing answers. Readers grow to feel like they know writers and think of them almost as friends. This kind of intimate rapport is obviously appealing at a time when many people crave connection online and don’t know what to trust.
I was happy to get to write about this for CJR’s latest print issue, out today. I spoke with more than two dozen newsroom leaders and newsletter writers, some of whom politely pointed out that, although the buzz might be louder than ever, newsletters have been around for years. Indeed, media trends often can seem at once like old news and the hot new thing. Writing in 2000 for The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead observed how one blogger’s announcement that he was abandoning his blog “provoked a flurry of postings from neophyte bloggers, who feared they were facing the Twilight of Blogging before they had really had a chance to enjoy the Dawn of Blogging.” Journalists have fretted for at least a decade about whether the newsletter wave has crested. But publishing is cyclical, and just as newsletters represent a return to the intimacy of blogging, another cycle may be underway.
Anne Helen Petersen, who’s Culture Study Substack has about 157,000 subscribers, fears that “most people do not have the capacity to pay for a well-balanced diet of newsletters.” A solution, she said, might be “to combine a bunch of paid newsletters together, which turns into … a magazine.”
Here’s my story:
On another note, one of my best friends (and former CJR colleagues), Jack Murtha, co-authored a book about misinformation in healthcare. It’s being published tomorrow! Here are Amazon and BookShop links to order Dead Wrong.
Wynnie is eagerly awaiting her copy. Hope you all have a nice week.
We do need to slow the drift away from reporting/opinion to click/addicting fare. Maybe newsletters are a help in that direction. JF