The past few years have seen an explosion in the newsletter as a specific form. Even before the Substack boom — indeed, possibly giving rise in its own way to that very boom — , we had the Republic of Newsletters. I participated in it small and lovely fluorescence myself just a bit. But it got me wondering, as the Republic was in many ways eclipsed by the mighty sphere of influence that is Substack and its kind: What distinguishes newsletters from blogs?

A few obvious potential ingredients:

• Inbox vs. feed reader (or, just as often, social media or remembering to click there). Where and how each item shows up matters.
• Visibility of archives? Usually front and center on a blog and hidden away with an emphasis on recency for newsletters.
• How interaction works, specifically the nature of a reply being the same as any other reply to an email vs. requiring public comments or one’s own website for blogging.
• The relative ease of monetization, at least with models like Substack, Ghost, and Buttondown.

---

That last was the thing that stood out to me in the wake of the emergence of Substack and competitors over the course of 2020 and 2021: funding. The Newsletter, as compared to the Blog, is not really mechanically different, and you could do exactly what Substack has done with newsletters with a blog — Stripe makes it nearly trivial, and in fact while Stratechery — the model on which Substack is quite explicitly based — is delivered to my inbox as a newsletter… it’s also a blog!

It is thus interesting to observe how the connotations of the medium matter more than the mechanics in this case. Is Stratechery a blog or a newsletter? It’s both. And yet I cannot help but think that it matters, including in how Ben Thompson thinks about what he is doing and therefore how he writes every issue, that it mostly goes to people’s inboxes rather than to a feed reader.

I was conscious of there being something distinctive about a newsletter vs. a blog when writing Across the Sundering Seas, and I am conscious of it now writing these words, and I am conscious of it every time to sit down to write an issue of my music newsletter.

Part of the difference implied by the assumed reading context of email inbox vs. open web page or feed reader is the perceived immediacy of the thing, I think. On the one hand, it seems silly to suppose that an email should feel more immediate, more personal, more — for lack of a better word — intimate. Our inboxes are full of spam and the seventeenth sale run by the same company just this week¹ and bills and reminders of appointments and there is absolutely no reason that an email from someone should feel any different from reading something from an RSS feed, not least when my feed reader will happily turn your email into a feed and let me read it that way.

Nonetheless, when I am writing and when I am reading, a blog does feel like it has a different assumed relationship to its audience that does an email. The intentionality of someone asking to get your words in their inbox is much the same as their adding you to their feed reader, but quiet different from their finding a post via some link aggregator or social media.

---

I also like Brad East’s take, though I don’t think it names quite the same things I am getting at here. After all: Dan Cohen’s wonderful Humane Ingenuity is not a Substack, but most of what I can only describe as subtle generic differences from a blog are still there, as they are in the distinction between L. M. Sacasas’s old blog and his current newsletter. There is overlap, to be sure, with the points Brad makes; but also divergence.

---

These are my thoughts as of today. As you can see: still a bit of a jumble. So what do you think makes a newsletter different from a blog, if anything?

---

Notes

1. If your items are always on sale, are they ever on sale? ↩︎