We’ve Been Doing Newsletters Since Before They Were Cool (Again), And Now We’re Actually Telling You About It

from the this-ain’t-no-substack dept

Look, we get it. Your inbox is probably drowning in newsletters right now. Every publication, influencer, and their cousin’s dog walker has suddenly discovered the revolutionary concept of… sending you emails with stuff to read. Who could have predicted that people might want content delivered directly to them?

Well, actually, we could have. Because we’ve been doing this since 1997.

Here’s the thing that’s particularly amusing about the great newsletter “revolution” of the past few years: it’s being hailed as some brilliant innovation that will save media from the tyranny of social media algorithms and platform dependency. Meanwhile, we’ve been quietly proving that exact point for almost three decades.

Back when Techdirt started, it literally was a newsletter. Email was the primary way we distributed things for the first couple of years. But somewhere along the way, we kind of forgot to mention that we still send out a daily email with the full text of every single post. We just had a tiny email logo in the upper righthand corner, and many thousands of you actually subscribed to get those full text daily newsletters.

Not excerpts. Not teasers designed to drive clicks. The entire damn thing, delivered to your inbox every day.

While everyone else spent the last few years “discovering” that newsletters are the future of media (again), we just kept quietly sending ours out to all of you who had subscribed, but never once mentioning its existence in the past couple of decades.

We’ve finally updated the tools we use to manage and send the newsletter, which means we now have actual flexibility to do more interesting things with it. Previously, our newsletter was essentially “here’s today’s posts in email form”—which, to be clear, is still exactly what it is today. We made sure that step one was just recreating what we already had been sending, because why fix what isn’t broken?

But now we have the infrastructure to potentially experiment with different formats, frequencies, or focus areas if that’s what you want.

The core offering remains the same: subscribe, and every day you’ll get the full text of everything we published, delivered to your inbox.

Now that we have better tools, we’re curious about what else you might want to see from our newsletter. Weekly roundups? Deep dives into specific topics? Digest emails instead of full text?

We’ve got some ideas, but we’d rather hear from you. Drop a comment below and let us know what would make a Techdirt newsletter more valuable to you. Do you want more analysis, different formatting, or just more reminders of all the crazy stories we cover?

We’d like to hear from people who receive the current email with all our posts (are there other supplementary newsletters you’d want to sign up for as well?) and from those who aren’t interested in the current email (is there something else you would want to receive?)

For now, though, the main thing is this: if you want Techdirt delivered to your inbox every day, you can do that now, and it’s easier than before when you had to hunt around the site for that tiny email icon.

You can subscribe from this page, or by using the widget at the bottom of this post, or via the signup form in the right-hand navigation bar at the top of any page. It’s free, it’s daily, and it’s the full text of everything we publish.

And yes, we realize the irony of writing a blog post to promote our newsletter that will then be included in our newsletter. But let’s not get too deep in the weeds on that.

Now, what other newsletter features would actually be useful to you?

Filed Under: email, newsletter, techdirt

Companies: techdirt