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What do you call a newsletter writer? "Blogger" seems wrong even though the sector is trying to kill/substitute blogs and claim the term. "Writer" seems too broad. "Substacker" seems too specific to the market leading brand.
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I think the broad unifying feature is that it is pseudo-public content built around individuals or cozyweb redoubts. Unless you're subscribed, you only get to see the public posts. There's something besides money-making to this access control. An element of discourse control.
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Hmm... yeah, the difference between bloggers and newsletterers (I think we'll default to this out of convenience despite the awkwardness) is drawing a boundary around the discourse. It's like a small city state where a blog is more like a storefront for free stuff in a metro.
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In a strange way, bloggers seem more commercial despite making less money. Newsletterers are ideologues for pay.
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There's enough competition in the space that that's not accurate, plus normatively I don't like validating monopolistic brand-capture of a medium. Especially email which is at least still a cosmetic commons despite capture by gmail etc.
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Replying to @vgr
eh, substacker is probably right it's a proprietary eponym, like how people user Kleenex instead of "tissue"
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Not concerned about the actual term so much as the worrisome state of a thing I'm invested in not having a True Name. One must not trust things that lack a True Name.
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"Blog" was a really true name for what it was, even though literal "web log" aspect disappeared in about 5 minutes.
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There is also a definite relationship between newslettering (now the verb works fine) and culture warring. It is escalated and paywalled culture warring in many ways. Newsletter content tends to be more polarized and ingroupish than blog content.
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As a blogger I basically write for whoever cares to read, and don't care to find out who they are for the most part unless they choose to tell me. As a newsetterer I do write for a "side" of some sort even though I don't know what it is
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There is no such thing as a medium-independent message. If it's medium-independent it's data at best, and even that's a shaky claim. Blogs and newsletters are definitely *very* different for me.
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Replying to @vgr
Definitely just "blogger", there's no functional difference for most of us and it's basically replacing the existing space
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You may not see the differences as a reader, since I try to continue some of my old blog styles in my newsletters, but from the writing perspective there's a ton of differences in tone, rhetorical choices, audience relationships etc. Money is not the only factor.
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One of the reasons I'm curious about this is that I have a gut-level clear sense of what blogging is, and I had that within like 2 years of starting. I haven't yet hit that medium-significance-fit insight with newsletters.
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I'm looking for a theory of newsletters on par with my cozyweb theory of the web... kinda macro theory of the microbehaviors
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Hmm. I think the sub-genre that actually aims at being captured by an audience rather than falling into capture unwittingly should be called pandercraft.
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Replying to @jamescham and @vgr
audience capture is the result, but what is the intention? And what is the name of the work product(s) in realizing that intention?
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