Email Newsletters Are a Blight on Mankind

Justin Wolfers is annoyed by the email newsletter bubble. Brad DeLong comments:

Authors seeking both eyeballs to sell to advertisers and a committed, engaged audience with which they can conduct a conversation are now trying to ride two horses—a clickbait audience served by self-contained pieces, and a newsletter audience with which they can interact and converse. I don’t think it is working very well.

Is that what’s happening? I’ve always thought there was something different going on: the professionalization of the blogosphere has, ironically, made blogs too stuffy and corporate. If you want to write a post complaining that the local supermarket doesn’t carry the brand of peanut butter you like, you can hardly do this at Vox.com or 538 or the Washington Monthly.¹ Those sites are reserved for serious commentary. So if you still want to write that kind of stuff, you do it in a newsletter that’s all yours and nobody else controls.

But Brad is suggesting that the real motivator is a desire to—what? Avoid the trolls? (Who cares about trolls?) Write in a more interactive space? (How are newsletters more interactive than blogs?) Write in a more private space where you can toss out weird ideas with less potential for blowback? (Cowards.) Create “added value” for subscribers who will hopefully donate money to you/your employer? (You corporate shill, you.)

I think we should toss this question to the newsletter writers. What’s the deal? If you need a second writing space, why not a quick-and-dirty blogspot blog or Tumblr or Medium? Why the throwback to email?

¹I typically solve this problem by writing this kind of stuff on weekends, which I consider a more personal space. So far, nobody has disabused me of this notion.