I don’t know about you, but I feel like we’re in the middle of a newsletter renaissance. The newsletter format, which filled physical mailboxes back in the day and email inboxes at the turn of the millennium, feels delightfully old-fashioned. We live in a time packed with Instagram stories, Twitter thread updates and personal ideologies spread on Facebook. There’s a sense of immediate information and opinion output from the sources that we turn to on a regular basis.
But amidst all of these online updates, the newsletter is very noticeably making a comeback.
A lot of my favorite people on the internet are 240-character Twitter wordsmiths. I eat up their insights and pithy stories like delicious brain candy. Imagine my joy at the discovery that many of these same internet people (who I jokingly like to think of as “some of my best friends who don’t know I exist”) launched newsletters that could drop into my inbox on a regular basis. The brain candy of a quick tweet is now transformed into something more substantial for my mind and soul…something that feels much more like a light lunch spent laughing with a good friend.
Social media platforms provide a certain kind of immediacy, with rapid-fire responses to current events and daily goings-on. But a newsletter…that takes time, energy, thoughtfulness and planning that you can’t always get from your favorite internet personality’s social media feed.
Newsletters are lengthier, more personal, more curated. And, even though I know they’re often meticulously scheduled, I treat each one like a welcome surprise. They’re like little gifts of actual content scattered in between the endless Old Navy and Lush Cosmetics promotional emails that dominate my inbox.
There are plenty of great internet personalities with newsletters out there, but here are three of my personal favorites to get you started if you, too, wish to be part of the newsletter renaissance.