2020: The Year of the Newsletter
Your inbox may be the last place to find focus on the internet.
2020 has been a year of many things: disease, political awakenings, financial destruction. But, on a smaller note, I think it’s also the year of the newsletter.
I’ve been a newsletter junkie for about a decade now. A couple years ago, a friend confided that he loved his job but really, “All I want to do is stay home and read newsletters.” I nodded vigorously. Who doesn’t love an email full of personal confessions, carefully curated links, and good-mood gifs without interruption? This year it seems newsletter fever has spread and my friend’s dreams have come true: Everyone is staying home… and reading newsletters. Or writing them. Why? NPR’s Bobby Allyn described the medium as uniquely positioned to ride out a perfect storm of “frustration with social media algorithms, people hunkered down in the pandemic staring at their screens, and a media industry hammered by the economic downturn.”
But, if you’re not a journalist, you probably aren’t familiar with the pivot to Substack, or how Mailchimp first dominated the medium, or why Axios based its business model on email roundups. You probably have a reasonable relationship with newsletters and think my list of faves (see below) is a recipe for information overload. And you might be right…
