In my post on Matt Labash and Twitter, I argued that the microblogging site is best understood as a news-delivery-device. Yes, there are a number of people who do Twitter wrong—including the people who seized on the fact that Matt once wrote a piece decrying DVDs to dismiss his whole argument with 140-character potshots that consisted of little more than "Old man said something stoopid once LOLOLOLOL"—but that's not the medium's fault. The discussions we have on the Internet are evolving, but what's evolving even more quickly is the way we start those discussions.
The newsletter is another step in that evolution. Actually, as Alan Jacobs notes in this post, it's almost a devolution: Newsletters have been around since nerds first started arguing about Star Trek on their listservs. But newsletters are a handy tool, especially when they're compiled by someone you trust on a topic you care about. As Jacobs writes:
For instance, think about how much gets written about baseball every day. More than I could possibly read, even among the dozen or so sites that I have subscribed to via RSS — or had subscribed to, until I discovered The Slurve, the fabulous daily newsletter created by Friend of TAC Michael Brendan Dougherty. I’ve removed all those baseball sites from my RSS feed, and just wait peacefully for The Slurve to show up in my mailbox in the morning. You really should subscribe if you like baseball.
The problem is, now I wish I had a Slurve for everything. An intelligently curated — I hate that word when it is misapplied, which is usually, but there’s a proper use — an intelligently curated daily (or even weekly) newsletter on soccer, and one on academic life, and one on the digital humanities, and one on the arts….
Full disclosure: I also subscribe to the Slurve. I subscribe to The Transom too. I think newsletters are handy tools. Like Jacobs, I too wish there was someone I trusted out there collecting interesting news and notes on the arts and pop culture; it'd make my life much easier.
The newsletter is just a medium. It can be used for good or for evil. When it's used for curation—pulling together disparate sources to save you time and effort—it's great. Just like Twitter! But we shouldn't disregard the medium just because it's new and some people use it idiotically.