How to Keep Your Newsletter Sanity
How to use old tech to make the experience of reading online newsletters a whole lot more pleasant.
I'm taking a short break from politics and philosophy to talk about another topic related to this ReImagining Liberty newsletter. Namely, newsletters. The Internet is a very nifty communication medium, but how we interface with it is always shifting, and the shift to newsletters now has an element of saturation. And part of that, I suspect, is newsletter fatigue.
Let me tell a story about how what's old is new again, and how in this case, what's old is better.
Like many of us, you probably have newsletter fatigue. Some years ago, all of your favorite writers launched Substacks, every day more are starting newsletters, and while you want to keep up with them, every new subscription means another email a week (at least!) clogging your Gmail or Outlook inbox, and competing for attention with the emails you actually need to read and respond.
Given how many newsletters there are that you'd like to keep track of and ideally read, wouldn't it be cool if instead of getting them all in Gmail, you had a single, nice app they just showed up in, and you could quickly browse through them, read them in a clean interface, save ones you like, and share the ones you particularly like?
That's the way things used to be. Except, back then, we didn't call them "newsletters," but instead "blogs," though they amounted to the same thing. And in those glory days, there was an app called Google Reader that let you subscribe to your favorite blogs and aggregate them all in one place. It was glorious—even if the user interface, in those earlier days of the web, wasn't quite as pretty as what we're not used it.
When Google killed Google Readers, there was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, because it was such a beloved way to "consume" frequent, longer form web content from a variety of writers.
But here's the thing: What made Google Reader great wasn't Google reader, it was a web technology called RSS. "Really Simple Syndication" sat behind the scenes on all those blogs, and gave tools like Google Reader a standardized and simple way to pull in the blog's posts, format them, and display them alongside other subscriptions. And, even when Google Reader died, RSS didn't go anywhere. You can still find plenty of "feed reader" apps, many of them much nicer than Google Reader ever was. On the web, I have a soft spot for Inoreader, but Feedly is nice too. On the desktop, if you've got a Mac, Reeder is gorgeous (and it looks like a new version is in the works), but a search of the Mac App Store for "feed reader" will turn up plenty more. (I haven't used a PC in 25 years, so I can't speak to that, but I'm sure there are lots of great ones.)
And here's the other thing: Every one of those newsletters you subscribe to? (Or almost every one?) It still has an RSS feed. Substack publications do. And most any feed reader (see above) that you download will have a nifty feature where if you drop the web address of the newsletter in, it'll find the feed for you.
What this means is if you're feeling newsletter fatigue, there's an easy fix, and it doesn't mean subscribing to fewer newsletters. In fact, a good feed reader will make it a breeze to follow and skim through even more than you're (probably) already subscribed to. (Think of it like following a bunch of people on social media, except that each one won't post anywhere near as frequently.)
So play around with different feed readers to find one you like. Most all will let you export a list of your subscriptions, and then most all will let you import such a list, which makes it easy to try several and move between them without the tedium of resubscribing to each newsletter you want. And grab the RSS feeds of all your favorite newsletters, and if your reader can't find them automatically, if you Google "[newsletter platform] RSS feed," chances are you'll get a page explaining where it is. (If you don't know which platform your favorite writer is using, it's typically listed in the footer of newsletter emails.)
And if you're fatigued by emails from this newsletter, first, I'm sorry. But, second, maybe make mine the first RSS feed you drop into your shiny new reader app. Here it is: