I am a New Delhi-based journalist and communications professional. I found your post very informative. Thanks for all the inputs.

Cheers,

Vijay Srinivas

And your thoughts on breaking down the e-newsletter to feed into other social networks makes sense especially for people who no longer tap into newsletters. Communications professionals will need to keep abreast with emerging technologies to grab the attention of this audience.

It can be as simple as creating standalone articles out of newsletter content as you suggest. Or as Nancy mentioned, the newsletter itself can be a summary of content from blogs, tweets and other social media tools.

Cheers-Meena

Cheers-Meena

Your points about making newsletters usable by potential readers with attention span challenges (we all are challenged in this regard) are absolutely true, but there’s more to not losing valuable readership.

As Vanessa suggests, there’s value in 1. diversifying channels, and, I’d say, 2. aligning content production with dissemination channels, while keeping attention focussed on listening.

Traditional newsletters are for dissemination, a one-way flow: how can people interact with the articles in it? how do you assess what topics readers liked the most? can they rate, comment, link to parts of it?

In this light, what is dead is the traditional, monolithic issue-based newsletter, a direct derivative of the print product (and in pdf, for good measure…). What’s also dead is the purely email-based newsletter, that has no life on a web site or an archive for people to retrieve it via search engines or direct links. What is dead is the concept of the newsletter as the (dead)end product of an editorial process.

What is still very alive is the power of email as a distribution channel: we all still spend a lot of time on email, so this is a great way to distribute information. What needs a great injection of life is the concept of the newsletter as a collection of articles and news, each one of which can have their own online life, so they can be linked, searched, bookmarked, commented (if the platform allows it) and evaluated individually.

The rise of alternative channels, like feeds, social bookmarking, twitter, poses an effectiveness/efficiency challenge. So, how can we produce good, relevant content that is to be distributed on multiple channels, even if we still call it a newsletter?

The point, in my opinion, is about aligning content production with the multiple digital channels available, for examples combining RSS feeds and email distribution.

Breaking down a newsletter in individual, standalone articles is the first step towards giving each one of them a potential social life, so that they can be bookmarked, shared, searched, twitted, monitored, commented, rated, syndicated, with the ultimate goal of improving outreach and covering all possible channels where our audiences are.

Eventually, it’s the editorial approach that needs to change: quality control, relevant content and simple design remain important, but are we thinking about what happens to our valuable content after clicking on the Publish button?