News feeds, the Future of Newsletters

News feeds are a wonderful thing and it might very well be the next generation newsletters.

Today's newsletters have a number of issues that prevent it from gaining really widespread penetration.

• Privacy:
  People are becoming more and more reluctant when it comes to disclosing their personal information like their name and email address.
• Spam:
  Many newsletters is sent out as spam, destroying the credibility of newsletters for everyone.
• Unsubscribe:
  Because of spam and very inconsistent ways to unsubscribe - many people simply just block newsletters when they do not want it anymore.
• No HTML:
  Even today, we cannot be sure how our email looks - some may have disabled HTML, other simply use email clients with sub-standard rendering.

And let's face it. Many people actually want to receive newsletters - if they are in control of them. But, today most people do not subscribe because of fear of not be able to unsubscribe in the future.

All these issues are solved with news feeds.

• The subscription process is handled exclusively on the client's computer, so there are no privacy issues. The reader do not have provide any information in order to get the newsletter
• Marketers cannot alter your subscriptions. So, you will never get spam newsletter (e.g. newsletters you have not subscribed to).
• Like the sign-up process, the unsubscribe process is handled exclusively on the client's system. Again this removes any privacy issues - not to mention it ensures the all important consistency when unsubscribing.
• News reader do handle HTML, so you can emphasize text, create inline links and include images - and you can generally rely on that it is delivered.

It basically solves all the negative issues we have with email based newsletters. It gives back the power to your readers, which is a good thing because that will, in turn, increase loyalty to you and your company.

We just need to make newsreaders a more widespread medium. Maybe we should have Microsoft and Apple to incorporate it directly into their email programs (mail and Outlook)?

Read also: News Feed with Style

More from Baekdal

Why publishers who try to innovate always end up doing the same as always

Almost every time a news site launched something new, they also cover the same stories the same way.

27 pages

A guide to using editorial analytics to define your newsroom

Editorial analytics is the tool we use to define how to report the news.

39 pages

What do I mean when I talk about privacy and tracking?

Tracking isn't the problem, destinations are.

13 pages

Let's talk about Google's 'cookie-less' future and why it's bad

Google wants to build tracking into the browser, and then remove personal identifiers ... but is that good?

22 pages

I'm not impressed by the Guardian's OpenAI GPT-3 article

AIs can be both good and bad, but using an AI to fake some text is always bad.

14 pages

Should media be tax exempt?

Many people in the media wants newspapers to be tax exempt, but what about the rest of the media?

15 pages

More studies that don't mean what we think they mean

When a publishers says that WhatsApp converts 12 times more people than their website, what does that actually mean?

12 pages

The thing about Facebook and political advertising

Facebook said that it wouldn't block misleading political ads, so let's talk about that

21 pages

The Original Cookie specification from 1997 was GDPR compliant

Cookies today are doing all kinds of bad things, but did you know that the original creators wanted to stop that?

24 pages

The thing about the EU copyright law and Google refusing to pay

We all knew this would happen, but Google won't pay publishers for snippets.

6 pages