The email newsletter seems to be undergoing something of a continuing renaissance. Quite a number of the smartest people I know now do their own update, and the list of insightful newsletters that now arrive my inbox keeps on growing. Since I first wrote about the Rebirth of the Newsletter, there's a number of others that have been added to my recommended list, including:
Shane Parrish's (aka Farnam Street) weekly update
Alexis Madrigal's excellent '5 Intriguing Things'
The Undercuurent weekly dispatch
The Storythings weekly newsletter
Anjali Ramachandran's international startup-themed Other Valleys
Strands of Genius from Faris and Rosie
The Almighty weekly Dark Matter
Steven Johnson's innovation focused How We Get to Next
And it would be remiss of me not to mention my own curated weekly newsletter which (unbelievably) I've been doing now for almost five years (you can sign up to that here). And of-course there's Fraggl, which is set up on the premis that combining different forms of curation can surface great and relevant content.
It's notable too how apps and publishers are using email as a key tool for content discovery, and some are creating new context-driven email products. Pocket, for example, do an excellent weekly summary of top articles saved using the app. The daily Medium emails are the main way in which I find Medium posts I want to read (although if I'm honest I find them a tad too much), and no doubt inspired by the excellent Quartz daily email (which acts as a kind of distributed home page), the FT recently launched First FT – key news and thought stimulus delivered to your (mobile friendly) inbox in time to read on your daily commute to work.
And there seems to be real value in it. Witness Thrillist Media who send out over a billion entertainment and product driven emails a year which are the foundation for an e-commerce operation that generates almost $100m in revenue. And interesting startups like TheSkimm, an informally written daily news briefing targeted at young women that has recently passed a million subscribers and raised over $6 million in funding.
The interesting thing about all this is that inspite of how much we all complain about groaning inboxes, email seems to be growing in importance as a content discovery tool (perhaps because we spend so much time in it, and it is such a device-agnostic, action-oriented medium) and ironically has the potential to help us better distinguish signal from noise.
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