Email

LIKE MANY CONTEMPORARY INTERNET users I subscribe to the newsletters of people whose writing I enjoy. These drop into the inbox of my email with a satisfying regularity. In a sense each of these fulfils the same niche as blog entries once did, with a bit more formality, each being a self-contained piece of writing by a single author generally on a theme or interest basis. Each invites me to subscribe, like, support. Are they novel?

Email newsletters today have a quality that even in their heyday weblogs didn't enjoy: subscription money for their writers. That subscription transaction is the basis behind companies like Substack and Beehiv, and Ghost, and many others, for writing which is too long or serious enough not to be confined to the realm of social media 'posting'. These all exist further on a spectrum of mailers and promoters, between fully fledged marketing services like Mailchimp, which are meant to serve as a public information superstructure to a more important organisational base, outright fundraising vehicles like Patreon, and the oldest of them all, venerable listservs like GNU mailman, where those of us of a certain age remember as one of the means people had arguments on the internet before social media. (Usenet, root of the Hot Takes evolutionary phylum, is at the time of writing functionally extinct).

Part of what is going on is the death of a functional journalism economy. The writers of these kinds of newsletters would have, and did, earned perfectly good wages doing reporting or niche writing. Since those jobs don't exist any more each writer is out on their own to try to survive on individual subscriptions. Ironically, the more successful newsletter platform Substack has succeeded by drawing in 'celebrity' writers whose name recognition acts as a tent pole to shelter the rest of the lesser known writers, in much the same way journalism has always worked; unfortunately, since many of those celebrities are Nazis, the platform and the genre as a whole suffers in reputation.

What does not suffer though, is one eternal element of the internet, unkillable as mushrooms, which is useful for anything and infinitely reliable: email. Blogs recede, newspapers die, reader apps come and go, but email is forever.