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The First Newsletter - Electronic News Today 411
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Email Newsletter Design The First Newsletter: Electronic News Today Today's Electronic News was a fax-based newsletter that followed a two-page rule. The newsletter could take up no more than two pages because a third party provider, which distributed the newsletter, charged us per total pages sent. So, a three page newsletter would up our costs by 50 percent. Consequently, the newsletter valued pith in writing and creative spacing in layout above all else. As a result, the newsletter took up every available inch of its allotted two pages, like a gorged boa constrictor. By constrast, email was an entirely different animal. The amount of copy you could plug into an email was virtually limitless. So space was not an issue. The issue, however, was fulfilling the newsletter's mission. The email newsletter had two goals: drive traffic to the Web site and provide advertisers with an attractive place to deliver their messages. To satisfy these demands, the newsletter now had to emphasize pith in its design and creativity in its writing. It needed to say just enough to attract the readers' attention, but not enough to satisfy their needs. They needed to be enticed enough to click the link and no more. I really had no idea how to design an email newsletter. I received only one, The Internet Standard' magazine's Media Grok, which dissected the writing of various columnists and reporters on the tech sector, specifically Internet-related articles. So I did not have much to go on. The knowns were that we averaged seven to ten stories a day, some of which were too short to avoid sending in full, and that we had an established pattern of practice of assembling the full articles articles in order of importance. So I opted for a format that continued this practice with one twist, at the top of the newsletter the day's headlines would be listed, later followed by the articles themselves. Below is a sample edition of the newsletter.
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