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The First Newsletter - Electronic News Today 411
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Email Newsletter Design From 1997 to 2000, I worked for Electronic News, the forty-plus-year-old grand dame of the computer industry. In addition to putting out our flagship weekly newspaper, we also distributed a fax newsletter containing the day's top technology stories to a group of high paying technology executives. Every day we pruned, plucked, snipped and, sometimes, spiked news stories to condense the day's news into our newsletter's two-page maximum size. It was often the hardest chore of the day, one that usually came my way. With the advent of email newsletters, though, it seemed rather wasteful to spend one hour out of every workday massaging this text into two pages. So I suggested that we make a transition from fax-based newsletter to email-based newsletter. In 1999, I got the go-ahead to do it, so I redesigned the newsletter, and Today's Electronic News was reborn as Electronic News Today (first issue: July 12, 1999). Forget cell phones and web pages, email newsletters are the delivery method of modern communication. How else can consumers already tapped by the demands of their work keep up with the day's headlines and keep informed on their interests, which can be varied as Aikido, tap dance, Handspring PDAs, wordsmithing and Apple Macs? Email newsletters deliver need to know information in clean, convenient formats that make staying informed much easier, redeeming a form of communication threatened by junk mail. I learned a great deal about how to make informative, easy-to-read text-based email newsletters during the creation of ENT, as Electronic News Today was known, and the redesign I initiated a year later. The experience later proved invaluable to me at ActorsUpdate and at the Center for Children and Technology. This section contains each of these newsletters. But it all had to start somewhere. To check out my first newsletter, click the link at the bottom of this page. For all others, use the "In this Section" navigation links in the left column of this page.
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