The Newsletter of the Future

1. Newsletters will be exclusively electronic.

The trend towards exclusively electronic newsletters has already begun, of course. They are delivered via e-mail to your desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

Yet there are still people who prefer the printed newsletter in their hands, just as they might prefer the printed book or magazine in their hands. In some cases, the audience still insists on a printed newsletter. Printing a newsletter from an electronically-delivered PDF isn’t the same thing as opening one’s mailbox and seeing a printed newsletter. For these people, the newsletter publisher will continue to put out the printed product. Audience needs and wishes are important.

But as more people get used to reading things exclusively in electronic format, printing a newsletter (should the reader require a printed copy) will be the reader’s responsibility, not the publisher’s.

2. Content will be mobile friendly.

Mobile-friendly web sites are moving from being a best practice to being a de facto standard. Web site developers must ensure that their work is accessible to their target audience—and that audience is increasingly using mobile devices to access the information.

The same goes for electronic newsletters, which must take the devices into account during the development phase.

3. Content will be democratized.

Suppose you subscribe to your local newspaper. Its job is to cover local news, with less attention paid to news elsewhere—across the state, across the country, or around the world—unless there’s a local angle that affects you, the reader, directly.

But when you read your news online, you don’t have to worry about the editor’s judgement about what stories you read. If you live, say, in New York, you can read a Los Angeles newspaper and get local, Los Angeles-focused coverage. This is a democratization of information, where the reader decides what’s important.

As more newsletters establish themselves to put their own mark on things, readers will have more choice in what to read.

4. Content will be in video.

This trend already exists thanks to the growth in cable television channels and the Internet. Many blogs focus on podcasts or short videos, and the reader doesn’t actually read, but rather listens and watches.