Some of the best known are by
Ann Friedman,
Alexis Madrigal,
Dan Hon and
Rusty Foster. There’s a
web ring for e-mail newsletters now,
but really the best newsletters are secret. The authors encourage
readers to share the subscribe link with other people who might be
interested, but request that no one share the subscribe link on social
media or the open web, creating a sort of darknet of semi-underground
dispatches.
But it’s more than just individual bloggers. Two or three years ago every site on the web was doing all it could to
trick
coax readers into “liking” them on Facebook. Today much of that focus
has shifted towards getting readers to sign-up for an e-mail
subscription. Just look at the prime screen real estate e-mail
subscription forms are given at Mashable, The Verge and, of course,
TechCrunch. Upworthy — the most “social media native” publication to
date — goes so far as to put a huge sign-up form below the first
paragraph of every story:
Quartz has a
much loved daily e-mail blast (though the sign-up form is oddly buried in a pull-down menu) and sports news company
The Slurve is going so far as to
build an entire business off its newsletter.
And it’s not quite the same as a digital newsletter, but the likes of
Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Medium are all sending daily or weekly
activity summaries to give people an overview of what’s been going on on
those sites, and try to entire people to interact. Just last week
Madrigal declared that
e-mail is still the best thing on the internet.
So why all this effort to herd readers into a medium that is supposed
to be dying? And why are we, as readers, so willing to invite even more
e-mail into our lives?
1. E-mail Gives Publishers More Control
Joanna McNeil has suggested that e-mail newsletters give writers a greater sense of intimacy with their readers than today’s social media services, while
Rebecca Greenfield
suggested the end of Google Reader as a driving factor in sending more
people into the arms of e-mail. I think both of these are part of
something bigger: sending e-mail gives publishers a greater sense of
control over how they reach their audiences.
Facebook is sending less traffic these days thanks to its algorithmic tweaks and
the sheer number of things competing for attention in your feed.
Twitter isn’t filtering content à la Facebook yet, but many fear it’s
only a matter of time. And that’s to say nothing of the other problems
of not having much control over the platform on which you share
information. You could be kicked off the site for violating its terms of
service. A site could do a massive redesign that renders your work
moot, or pivot into a different market. Or, like Google Reader, it could
just disappear.
E-mail gives publishers a bit more control. Yes, your newsletter
could end up in a spam trap, and things like Google’s Priority Inbox and
its smart labels do affect where your e-mails will be seen. But if
you’re sending mail that your readers legitimately signed up for, it
will probably find its way to them somehow, and that’s more than you can
say for a Facebook status update these days.
And you can own your own mailing list, more so than you can own just
about anything else online. Governments can seize your domain name. If
you forget to renew it, some squatter will snap it up and try to sell it
back to you for $1,000. But your mailing list is yours. Even if you’re
using a service like
Mailchimp or
TinyLetter, you can back-up your mailing list and use it with another program. And if you use a self-hosted mailing list like
Sendy,
Dada Mail or
the Newsletter plug-in for WordPress, you have even more direct ownership over your lists.
2. Readers Pay More Attention to E-Mail
Author Warren Ellis, who has been doing the e-mail newsletter thing for years, has written that his
mailing list
has a 5,000 out of 6,865 open rate. That’s exceptional, but shows how
powerful email can be. The newsletter for my personal blog has only
around 320 subscribers. But according to Mailchimp, each e-mail has
about a 20 percent open rate. That’s about 64 readers per e-mail. I have
over 7,000 Twitter followers, but a very successful post will tend only
to be clicked by about 20 people, according to Bitly, which works out
to less than 1 percent of my followers.
So while it might be harder to get people to fork over their e-mail
addresses than it is to get them to like or follow something, once you
do, they’re much more likely to actually pay attention, and you can
reach more people in the long run. Marketing types have known this for a
long time, hence all the get-rich-quick spammer websites that try to
entice you into swapping your e-mail address for a free e-book.
3. E-Mail Is Cross-Platform
E-mail is great way to reach mobile readers without having to talk
them into installing yet another pointless app. It works on everything
from tablets to feature phones to Commodore 64s with dial-up Internet
access.
4. E-mail Keeps All Your Clutter in One Place
That helps explain why publishers want us to sign-up for newsletters,
but why do readers actually do it? I think a big part of it is social
media fatigue. Other things try to replace e-mail,
only to become just as cluttered, creating a bunch of separate cluttered messes to deal with.
My inbox is a nightmarish hellscape. But I’d rather visit one
nightmarish hellscape per day than a dozen. And while there’s no way I
would want to get an e-mail newsletter from every single person I follow
on Twitter, those e-mail digests of what’s been happening on Twitter
are pretty handy. From a reader’s standpoint, I’d often rather just get a
daily or weekly digest than try to follow yet another Twitter account
or RSS feed.
5. E-mail Is the Original Social Media
For years, those of us who have advocated the
indie or
federated web
have called for social networks to be more like e-mail, but it turns
out e-mail itself is a pretty good social media platform. And while
getting people to sign up for a Diaspora or Identica account was always a
tough sell, just about everyone already has an e-mail address. And
e-mail has social features like “reply” and “share” (aka “forward”)
baked right in.
But beyond all that, it feels like an admission that the Internet
went horribly wrong somewhere along the way. Google+, Tumblr and
Facebook Groups felt like a tacit admission that the web had taken a
wrong turn somewhere around Friendster and was finding its way back to
LiveJournal. But now with the rise of newsletters and Snapchat and
“right to forget” legislation, it feels like we’re going back even
further, perhaps admitting that this whole web thing, with its search
engines and caches and screenshots, were perhaps a bad idea to begin
with and it’s not to rip it up and start again from e-mail on up.
More on::techcrunch.com
This
event is a bit atypical for Apple in that it’s being held neither on
Apple’s Cupertino campus nor the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San
Francisco. Instead, it’s being held at the Flint Center for the
Performing Arts in Cupertino. Our guess is that this has something to do
with capacity — Apple’s auditorium is very small and if Apple sees this
as a high profile release — there are rumors of a wearable, too — then it could want more bodies in the seats.
The
challenge is that larger tablets threaten to quickly become unwieldy.
But there’s recent evidence to suggest that larger screens on tablet
devices might not be nearly as preposterous as they once were; the
Surface Pro 3, for instance, has a 13-inch display and packs a full
computer within, yet remains perfectly usable (if a tad heavy) as a
tablet device.
Just like the Docs and Sheets apps and their counterparts on Android (the standalone Slides app 
Using
the flexible display over top of the buttons and switches has another
benefit – it allows Apple to potentially extend screen space, making it
possible to build all-display devices that can grow or reveal buttons
when needed. These can take the form of actual physical buttons, too, as
created by actuators used underneath the display layer to push up on
the screen and create ridges or bumps. The effect would be sort of like
what’s happening with the 
The
X30 also packs a 12 megepixel, 2/3″ X-Trans CMOS II sensor, EXR
Processor II and an F2.0 – 2.8 4x zoom 28 to 112mm equivalent lens. It
should have snappy autofocus, since it packs similar tech to the X100s,
and it also gains Wi-Fi over its predecessor. All of this comes at the
expense of larger dimensions, however, as the X30 weighs 2.2 ounces more
than the X20 and also adds 2 to 3 mm to each of its physical
measurements.
