It sure feels like we're living through an unprecedented boom in newsletters, but while email-based newsletters are experiencing a major surge, newsletters themselves have a long and honorable history.

https://www.wired.com/story/peak-newsletter-that-was-80-years-ago/

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In @wired, @michaelwwaters describes the newsletter boom of the 1930s, starting with Claud Cockburn's "The Week," launched in 1933 out of disgust with his employer, The Telegraph, and its right-wing complacency (Cockburn went on to break the story of Franco's fascist coup).

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The rise of cheap mimeographs - coupled with the USPS's subsidy for printed materials - created a boom in all kinds of niche and political publications, from sf fanzines to Allen Ginsburg's self-published chapbooks to The Ladder, a 1950s lesbian newsletter.

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Left-populism had a major home in newsletters, providing an alternative to the pro-big-business/pro-monopoly/anti-labor/anti-New Deal bias of the newspaper industry.

I hadn't known about In Fact, the newsletter founded by the ex-Chicago Tribune muckraker George Seldes.

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Seldes billed In Fact as "An Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press," reached 176,000 subscribers, and featured exposes on strike-breakers, tobacco industry/newspaper conspiracies to cover up smoking-related health risks, and FBI anti-union spying.

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In Fact inspired IF Stone to start his legendary Weekly, a 20-year newsletter that Stone published to 70,000 subscribers from a hand-cranked mimeograph machine.

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But this golden age of leftist newsletter publishing was crippled by the Red Scare, and the risks of appearing on a list of subscribers to a radical publication.

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The right's newsletters - paranoid, proto-Bircher publications like Joseph P Kamp's Headlines, and What's Behind Them ("Are Communists Infiltrating the YMCA?") morphed into the powerful newsletters published by Ayn Rand and Phyllis Schlafly, buoyed by the direct mail boom.

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Today, the legacy of the direct mail boom is a clutch of wealthy, ruthless grifters making enormous bank by terrorizing elderly Fox viewers into making donations they can't afford.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/20/no-mask-no-service/#dorr-brothers

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But lefty, anti-monopoly newsletter publishing is also alive and well, as tech startups like Substack promise both revenue streams AND access to the last truly federated distribution system: email.

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I really enjoy many of these new newsletters, though I worry that, on the one hand, they include a lot of invasive tracking, and on the other, that consolidation in email providers makes them incredibly dependent on Big Tech's forbearance.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/08/the-last-federated-platform/#postal-inspectors

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I have my own (totally independent, tracker-free, zero analytics, ad-free) newsletter, the Plura-List.

https://mail.flarn.com/mailman/listinfo/plura-list/

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I've discovered that if a bunch of my subscribers on, say, Apple Mail, don't open their daily newsletters, Apple's analytics classes the publication as spam for ALL subscribers on its platform.

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The consolidated nature of email is also very apparent in the software I use for the Plura-list, the venerable Mailman tool, a creaking dinosaur that looks terrible and is difficult for both publishers and subscribers to use.

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And yet, it's the best option if you want to host your own mailing lists (rather than exposing your subscribers to potential data-mining, etc).

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Meanwhile, if this history of mailing lists has you intrigued, I strongly urge you to check out the anthologies of IF Stone's Weekly.

http://ifstone.org/collected_writings.php

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I discovered these in the early 90s when I was working at Toronto's College Books, where the owner, Michael Jackel, had ordered them for our politics section. These anthologies absolutely blew my mind and transformed the way I thought about personal political writing.

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Decades later, they still resonate.

eof/