This rise of the single-operator newsletter owes to a few factors.
These are entrepreneurial folks going at it alone, independent of media organizations. Or, as we’re calling it for our purposes here, the single-operator newsletter. But in recent years, a third cohort of email sender has cropped up: the individually authored, mass-distributed email. Brands, as they are wont to do, have co-opted the technology for sales and advertising purposes, relying on email service providers (or ESPs) like Mailchimp and SailThru to blast out communiqués to thousands of customers - or potential ones - in one fell swoop.įor a long time, these were email’s two primary functions: direct peer-to-peer messaging (your friend emails you a funny link or life update) or business transactions (a brand solicits your patronage a publisher sends you something to read). Which isn’t to say that email is still a simple tool for communicating with friends and colleagues, as Tomlinson intended. Sure, the format has undergone some renovations (Outlook and Gmail were both game changers), but the gist as well as the utility are largely intact.
And yet, here we are, the majority of those technologies disappearing in the rearview as the humble email remains king.
Over the decades since, new forms of communication have come and gone: pagers, chatrooms, message boards, blogs, internet relay chats, AIM, SMS, Myspace, BBM. “Most likely was QWERTYUIOP or something,” he once wrote on his website. Tomlinson, who passed away in 2016, remarked in interviews before his death that the actual text contained in the body of that message - a test sent between two machines in the same room - has been lost to time. In 1971, MIT grad and computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the world’s first official email.
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