An ornamental leaf design with the word 'newsletter' in the center

Robin Rendle

Newsletters; or, an enormous rant about writing on the web that doesn’t really go anywhere and that’s okay with me

An illustration of a house at night with a figure at the window

My friend Lucy once told me that she falls in love with the way that someone thinks…

An illustration of a man looking at a watch being built

…and that’s what newsletters make possible for me; they’re a record of how strangers see the world.

An illustration of a group of people playing music

Newsletters give me permission to fall in love with someone I’ll never meet…

A group of people on a hot air balloon looking back at Earth

…someone very far away…

Under a streetlamp a man reads a letter

And over the past few years I’ve fallen in love with so many writers through newsletters! On all sorts of subjects!

The Cistern of Philoxenos, a subterranean reservoir in Istanbul

There are dazzling newsletters; those of grand adventures and epic mysteries…

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...and newsletters about complex systems, showing us how the world is put together.

A horseshoe geranium flower

Not to forget smaller newsletters, too. Break-ups! Coffee beans! Clocks! Northumberland flower gardens! These sit side by side with newsletters that are just…

A dog plays the flute

weird.

A group of women at the post office

So my question here is a difficult one to ask, because I love newsletters so very much…

An astronomer looks up at the stars

…but is this progress?

A sad boy is sat in a chair feeling sad

I guess there’s something about newsletters that bugs me, and I can’t put my finger on it.

Edison’s electric pen

It bothers me that writers can’t create audiences on their own websites, with their own archives, and their own formats. And they certainly can’t get paid in the process. (Although yes, there are exceptions).

A carbonated water factory

Heck, just the technical expertise required to have your own website is extremely cumbersome and inaccessible to many.

A man sits in a cave surrounded by coins

You might think: ah, newsletters are the future because that’s where the money is!

A man sits in a cave surrounded by coins

But the real advantage with newsletters is that they give us super powers. You don’t need to learn about HTML or CSS or databases to get started.

A giant person towers over an army

Despite these super powers, I still think that using email to send words to each other is just entirely ugh.

Two people look at a piece of paper

Perhaps I feel this way because reading everything in my inbox is somewhat antiquated. It’s almost as if we’ve gone back to reading off parchment after we invented books.

Two people look up at a series of beautiful paintings

Books are so much better than parchment in the same way that websites are so much better than email.

A person setting metal type

And we’ve all moved to newsletters at the very moment when websites can do amazing things with layout and typography! We finally have grids and beautiful fonts and the wonders of print design on the web for the first time.

Two divers fight an enormous crab

Yet websites are treated as these embarrassing, ugly, ad-riddled things, whilst newsletters have established some kind of prestige for themselves somehow.

Nusretiye Mosque

The web doesn’t have to be this ugly and embarrassing thing though; the web can be made beautiful.

A table floats into the air

And I’m saying this as someone who’s spent the better part of the last three years writing emails to strangers—because I feel both liberated and yet also cursed by them. Newsletters are just…inescapable if you want to be a writer today.

Skull and crossbones

But if websites are so great then why did everyone (including me) move to newsletters? Why did blogs die off? Well, there are ten million answers to those questions, but only three I want to focus on.

Two men fight fight with swords

Newsletters killed blogs because…

  1. They’re impossibly easy to publish.
  2. Your inbox is a notification stream.
  3. Writers can actually, ya know, get paid.
A man falls from the sky

Alternatively, websites today…

  1. Are difficult to make.
  2. Can’t notify people of new work.
  3. Aren’t able to pay writers easily.
A handmade organ

These are the main problems today but now, because of newsletters, I look back on writing for the web as this clunky, annoying process in comparison. The machine sure is beautiful but it requires so much damn work to get singing.

The bottom of the sea

So I wonder how we can get the best of both worlds here: the ease of publishing newsletters, with all the beauty and archivability of websites. But what I’m really asking is…

A beautiful landscape

…how do we make the web for everyone?

A dog walks down a street with a monocle

Let’s take a closer look.

Part One

Websites are too damn complicated

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Websites haven’t gotten any easier to make over the past thirty years.

Demons gather in hell

You still need to learn HTML and CSS to make a website. You still need to learn about hosting and domain names. You might even be forced to learn what the abbreviation CMS stands for, and I simply refuse to curse you with that knowledge.

A gondola falls from the sky

The web was originally intended to be read and written by everyone, but the technical hurdles of setting up a website excludes the vast majority of people. It should all be so much easier.

A circle of giant men gather around a fire

I’m not talking about the complexity of building giant web apps here. Even the smallest websites—with nothing more than text—are far too difficult to build.

Looting a pirate ship of its treasure

But perhaps we didn’t bother trying to improve writing on the web because we let social networks devour all our words—the archives be damned.

Looting a pirate ship of its treasure

The solution? Well, I have a few ideas, but one thing I’m dead certain of is that startups shouldn’t be fixing this for us.

Sea biscuit machine

There have been some positive developments in recent years with the likes of static site generators, but again they still feel way too complex to me.

Sea biscuit machine

On this note, not so long ago I stumbled upon a service called blot.im and it showed me what building a website could be like; easy, fast, accessible.

A person walks into a storm

I reckon this is the future we should be striving towards.

Part Two

RSS is for Nerds

Two men looking at a book

When you subscribe to a newsletter you don’t have to keep coming back to the source to see if there’s something new. Whenever a writer publishes something then you just get an email.

Two men looking at a book

The problem with the web is that when you publish something it just sort of disappears from sight. Writers have to spam all the social networks to remind people that they even exist.

A woman looks into a mirror to see a ghostly face look back

And yet the web sort of has this built-in notification stream and sort of…doesn’t at the same time.

A head rests on a table in a museum

It’s called RSS; an ancient, dusty technology that lets you subscribe to a website and see updates as they happen. With an RSS reader app you can see what’s new from your favorite writers.

Fortifications outside the city walls of the Alhambra

Basically my whole political platform is this: RSS is the promised land.

A dog reads the newspaper

It’s the perfect way to read the web and to keep up to date with things. So much so that I consider my RSS reader (Reeder.app) to be my favorite web browser, not Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.

Manufacturing glass bottles

The problem with RSS is that you need to know that RSS exists, how it works, which websites support it, etc. It’s nothing short of an enormous faff.

A microscope

But it’s not like RSS is brain surgery, the problem is that it’s hidden away and just complicated enough that 99% of folks won’t care about it.

An enormous steam hammer

RSS is far too complex!” you might say. Well, RSS-the-technology today is fantastically popular—it’s the machine that powers podcasts. So why isn’t RSS used for websites if we use it everyday for audio?

An enormous steam hammer

I reckon RSS never reached critical scale for websites because it was never built into the browser itself. The failure here wasn’t the technology but the distance between RSS and how we browse the web.

Eads Bridge

Hear me out: if RSS was renamed, rebranded, and brought to the surface of the browser then I expect legions of people would adore it. No longer would you have to give all these strangers your email address to sign up for the newsletter.

A skeleton pursues a man on a bobsled

And if we could subscribe to websites easily then the web itself might not feel quite so forgettable.

Part Three

Paying writers is too damn hard

A ghostly figure haunts a woodsman

This has been called the original sin of the internet. Since you can’t pay someone directly through the browser, the thinking goes, then all these other hacks pop up to squeeze money out of folks; invasive and ugly advertising, privacy-breaking data collection, etc.

A room full of people clap

If you have enough technical knowledge or a big enough following then you can build a subscription service for your website. This isn’t possible for a lot of writers though.

A diamond boring machine

But why should subscribing to a website be any more complex than subscribing to a newsletter? Why do I have to go through Substack or Patreon or the Kindle as a middleman?

A diamond boring machine

Look—I adore these services because they open the doors for so many new writers and buck wild stories. But that’s only because the web itself is so damn difficult to make work as an independent publishing platform.

A man is pushed off a gangplank

Paying and subscribing to a writer’s work should be one click away, without having to go through a middleman who takes a big percentage off the top.

Coins

There are neat developments in this space: services like Coil or web browsers like Puma are worth paying attention to because they’re trying to upend the way that money is distributed on the web.

There’s also, well, brace yourself: the Web Monetization API. That sounds scary! But I think it’s where things get truly interesting (although it’s still far too complicated for most writers to benefit from).

A painter at work

My point here is that being able to pay folks easily through the browser could open the door for all sorts of other artists, not just writers.

A young boy rides a strange contraption

Also, writers choose a newsletter service like Substack because the business model is straightforward. I just sort of wish this infrastructure was built into websites themselves.

A man is led into a secret door by the devil

My point is this: there’s a viable alternative to newsletters if we fill in all these gaps.

Two men float in a balloon

All I know is that the web today is not made for us. It’s no longer made for people to send charming bits of texts to strangers.

A person in a very strange underwater suit

Instead, I see the web as this public good that’s been hijacked by companies trying to sell us mostly heartless junk.

Knights storm a castle

The web today is built for apps—and I think we need to take it back.

Knights storm a castle

Because there are so many break-ups and coffee beans to write about! There are stories about clocks and Northumberland flower gardens waiting to be recorded, gift-wrapped, and delivered to us!

A woman reads a letter

What really excites me about the sudden popularity of newsletters is that it shows us how people desperately want this kind of writing still. They value the web in the same way that I do.

A monster attacks a ship

What this also shows me is that we haven’t given everything up to social networks yet. This makes me hopeful…

A monster attacks a ship

…because the web is still unfinished and there’s so much work left to do.

Making a toast at dinner

Special thanks to Old Book Illustrations for all these lovely woodcuts and metal engravings. Also thanks to Lucy Bellwood, Celine Xu, Jez Burrows, Tori Hinn, Ali Burnett, Crick, and the Letterform Archive for the LfA Aluminia type family.

A man saying goodbye

Now go away.