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What Is a Newsletter, Anyway?
And how is it different from a blog?
NOTE: This is a version of a piece I published at Substack this morning and thought it could apply here at Medium, too. We’re all getting into newsletters, so maybe now’s the time to talk about what readers expect when they open their inboxes and find ours there.
I would love to read what other newsletter owners think about it, whether you’re here at Medium, or over at Substack, or at any one of the other newsletter venues popping up everywhere. It’s a thing now!
When I sent out feelers at my first Substack newsletter, in August of 2020, I barely knew what a newsletter was. All I knew was that everyone was doing it and it looked like I needed to jump on that bandwagon. I had just started another newsletter for my now-defunct Medium publication, Indelible Ink, but that one made sense. It was there to promote the works of the writers I was publishing. Nothing more.
When I began my first newsletter (which had to go through three names before I settled on Constant Commoner, the name of an old blog of mine), I had no idea what I was doing. Or even why. What was a newsletter going to do that a blog or a Medium page couldn’t? I didn’t know, but I liked what I saw in other newsletters, and I wanted to try it.
