The Best Place To Read A Newsletter

I’m an avid newsletter reader.

But that’ll come as no surprise to those who know me well.

I’m naturally curious about much more than can fit into my day job or even my after-work side hustles like photography or cooking. Whether it’s a unique philosophical outlook on age-old questions, a new scientific exploration, a musician’s second coming, a gastronomical discovery, a morning life hack, or simply the latest tech news, it doesn’t take much to spark my curiosity.

Needless to say, I subscribe to quite a few newsletters to satiate that appetite—18 to be exact.

Let me back up a bit, though.

Where It All Started

Newsletters have had an oddly satisfying staying power in the digital world.

The original newsletters were actual offline mailings that would arrive at your brick-and-mortar doorstep gasp as snail mail prior to the internet’s takeoff.

Once the internet took form and email assumed the dutiful responsibility of being our new online doorstep, digital newsletters took off. They reached popularity as rather simplistic beings, a weekly digest from a family friend, a popular blog’s way to connect with you, their reader.

See the great piece (below) from in the New York Times about email’s transition.

For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated*The Media Equation Here at the Media Equation, we pride ourselves on keeping our readers abreast of the newest…*www.nytimes.comToday, they’ve morphed, yet again, into new forms—the most popular being a curatorial content aggregation—meaning that the sender has “done the work for us” of combing blogs, news sites, and more to digest as much of the web as he or she can and then recreated a short list of touchpoints for us to nibble on in their newsletter with links out to the original articles.

Aside from text messaging, newsletters are easily the most intimate content connection that a digital entity (a person or brand) can have with its audience—and no social network comes close. This is because as social media platforms ebb and flow, they also dictate the rules of engagement for publishers and have an increasingly tight grip on what content, subscribed to or not, the end user sees. We are simply overwhelmed on social. Email, on the other hand, feels like we’ve hand selected those newsletters and given the publisher a personal pass to captivate our attention.

Newsletters are effective because they hit us exactly where we are day in and day out—in our inbox.

A New Way

A few weeks back I started playing around with a new app on my phone called Stoop. It’s a simple yet beautiful product, specifically designed for newsletter reading. They angle themselves like a podcast discovery & listening app but for newsletters.

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering why I spent the first half of this post praising email’s sanctity, but just hear me out. Even inboxes have become overrun with clutter despite the ESPs best efforts to help us auto-sort into categories like ‘Primary’, ‘Updates’ etc.

Stoop’s thoughtful simplicity is the perfect new home for your favorite newsletters. My three favorite features are (1) their discovery element. It’s a super easy way to find new newsletters that I’d never heard of before in all sorts of unique categories. (2) Stoop has a great way of aggregating the different editions of each newsletter so that you can stay organized. (3) They have a great Tinder-esque swiping method to browse your current issues of each newsletter. And finally, for a bonus, you get a Stoop-specific email address so you can actually migrate your newsletters from your email inbox to your Stoop inbox thus decluttering your email without missing a beat on the great content you love. I’ve shared a few screenshots below. You can see a few of my favorite newsletters in the middle one. My top favorites are Dave Pell’s Next Draft, Josh Spector’s For The Interested and Austin Kleon’s…well, newsletter (his doesn’t have a snazzy name).

Anyways, I’ve very much enjoyed my time*—albeit relatively short so far—with Stoop and I hope a few of you will download it and let me know what you think.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and hope to see you back here next week for the continuation of my daily posts.

Last thing, I’ve been contemplating starting my own newsletter. If you’d like to be one of the first people to receive it (go easy on me), drop your email in the form below.