Magazines are superior products to newsletters

Most newsletters have turned into daily newspapers, publishing 3-4 pieces a week. If you’re like me and subscribed to many newsletters, you find yourself in a constant “catch-up game,” never able to read and, more importantly, understand the content. For the ones you are able to read, you skim and delete them, thinking you got “the gist of it.” If you take a break from chasing the finish line in these newsletters when you go on a vacation, you feel like the world has gone too fast while you’re lying on a beach. While the newsletters want you to think the world has moved on without you, magazines help you to see that it actually didn’t.

A few years ago, before a summer vacation, I didn’t want to bring my phone to the beach. I wanted a light, cheesy read to “waste” time on the beach and not think about anything from my daily routine. I had books with me, but also wanted short reads. I picked up Men’s Health and Monocle in the airport. While Men’s Health gave me the cheesiest read I had in a while and helped me sleep for many hours on the beach¹, Monocle unexpectedly opened new doors.

After that vacation, I started reading Monocle frequently. But Monocle provided much more than its content. I found myself reaching for magazines unconsciously more and more. While wandering joyfully in Berlin bookstores, I came across a small bookstore called “Do You Read Me?” On my first visit, I spent ~30 minutes in that tiny store, looking through magazines and buying four I’d never heard of before. As someone who reads articles, essays and opinions exclusively digitally, I discovered a different world (that existed for centuries).

Those few magazines showed me how much better products they are than all the digital newsletters I subscribed to.

Why newsletters are not great

Most of the digital newsletters are not editorial products. I receive an email from a writer, mostly talking about a single topic from a single perspective. The creator economy and digital consumer behaviour have forced many creators to focus on a niche, losing the benefits of an editorial approach. Everyone tries to shout louder as an individual. As a subscriber, I must subscribe to multiple newsletters to get broad perspectives on a single topic. Yes, the curation newsletters exist, but they almost never collaborate with the writer of the articles they share. They act as sourcing machines, focusing on one part of curation—selection—and shifting the rest to readers.

As a reader, I have to subscribe to multiple newsletters, skim through the hoses of content machines just to find a good article that has a possibility of giving me an additional perspective. If I’m lucky enough, I may leave my echo chamber and find another one. If I do this with enough newsletters, I may succeed in curating my ideas pool. But I have to do it every day and every week. Considering my RSS feed alone is reaching 50 items a week and I have interest in multiple topics, reading them all is impossible. There is no surprise that many people, including me, feel overwhelmed. However, the moment you stop chasing it for a week or two and come back, you realise that all articles deemed important to read were not important at all.

The digital newsletter ecosystem is centred around ‘recency’, like daily newspapers. Most writers think that they must talk about something relevant to people’s lives right now. That’s what grabs attention, and that’s the incentive for any writer. As a reader, when you stop consuming and look at the articles a month later, you discover that they are not as attractive as they were when you saw them right after they were published. Most content loses relevance over time.

That, you find it less in monthly magazines.

What makes magazines superior

Long-term thinking often leads to better writing. The writer must detach from the daily hustle to expand relevance until at least the next issue. If you follow this blog for a while, you may know that I don’t read daily news for the same reasons. Daily news is full of noise, clutter, and prediction. Something happens in a day, and all news agencies talk about that for days. The same is true for most newsletters. But monthly, bimonthly or quarterly magazines cannot do the same. Even if they do, they do it differently.

The magazines are time-bound differently. They have set dates for production and distribution. The cadence forces them to approach daily news differently—discussing the long-term impact. Journalists and writers must detach from daily life to see the bigger picture and trends. In newsletters (and, similarly, daily news), you don’t get this holistic thinking. As recency grabs the attention of the reader, there is nobody asking a writer to approach it holistically. Unlike magazines.

All print magazines have editors who are responsible for building the magazine or its sections. Working across theme and design and working with writers, other editors, photographers, designers and artists to improve the quality of the articles, pictures and design results in a tasteful product. Each issue of a magazine focuses on an area and has a theme. Although most newsletters also have a theme, they call it a niche, magazines bring together different voices: sometimes with conflicting ideas; sometimes each representing a piece in a puzzle.

The editor provides a filtering mechanism to eliminate pieces that won’t fit into the puzzle. It’s rare to have a low-quality text in a print magazine. Printing an article on paper forces everyone to up their game. All articles are vetted, edited, and each word is chosen carefully. The stakes are too high; the magazine business is ruthless. You don’t get this quality mindset with digital newsletters. Because the production is ‘free.’ If this newsletter issue is not great, the next one in two days has another chance.

How about personal blogs, big digital media, and curation newsletters?

Many print magazines offer digital subscriptions. I put their digital solutions into the same category as newsletters. When a magazine goes digital-first, print-second, its overall quality takes a hit. For example, Harvard Business Review’s online website is full of crap (even with editors). Because their main focus is digital, the magazine’s quality also suffers. Foreign Affairs is a good read in print, impossible to follow on digital. Monocle is already a packed magazine in print; digital is too much. However, when the magazine is print-first and digital-second, both solutions somehow become higher-end.

On the other hand, I still deem personal blogs superior to newsletters and in a different lane than magazines. Never mind the romanticising of indie web, personal blogs have a different purpose. Their purpose is not to become a product. An up-to-date weblog is beautiful in its clumsiness, gorgeous in its lack of perfection, and great in its all-over-the-place content. I might be biased because I have put a lot of effort into making this blog. However, I keep the weblogs I follow in my RSS feed because they give a lot of ideas about the person behind them, and that’s what matters in the end.

Writers against creator economy

Writing is a big challenge (from my experience), whether in print or online. Anyone who dares to publish their writing already goes through a lot of inner criticism. At first, the inner critic makes you hallucinate as a writer that your writing is of better quality just because you edited it a hundred times. However, in my experience working with a developmental editor, I can easily tell the stark difference between a text I edited twenty times and one a developmental editor edited once.

Learning how to write in the creator economy is difficult. The rule of creativity says that to be able to write well, you have to produce hundreds of bad ones. Picasso produced hundreds and thousands of pieces, and only a fraction were masterpieces. Eminem writes thousands of songs on scraps of paper, and a fraction of them turn into a song. That’s how creativity works.

This nature of creativity, combined with unrestricted publishing, gave birth to many writers (e.g., me) who also write newsletters. I am happy that some earn a living from online writing, even though it’s a difficult journey. However, eliminating editors and curation also means readers have to go through all our shitty writing. Worse, I don’t see a way out.

All should coexist, but not like today

I’m neither going to praise or romanticise the paper feeling and how good it’s to hold in hand nor vilify the whole digital ecosystem. All should co-exist. My criticism isn’t aimed at any writer, but at the direction of the newsletter ecosystem.

We need to abandon most Substack-style newsletters where the writer only writes without any editorial thinking. Although Substack-like platforms reduced the friction in writing, that friction was necessary. Perhaps all writers should have their own website and think about how to structure content and build a digital reading experience, not just a single article.

Instead of waiting for everything from the readers and pushing in all directions to grab more attention, perhaps we need more formats like the Ideas Letter or The Humanist Review of AI or more writers like Maria Popova from The Marginalian who is a grand boss editor in the shape of a writer. Perhaps we need more good, old personal blogs. I do not know which one we need, but I know there is no silver bullet. All should co-exist and complement each other somehow. I guess.

P.S. Not all magazines are great. You have to find what you like. We also need these magazines to get cheaper and become more accessible.