Why Newsletters Need Their Own Reading App
How software evolved for nearly every form of reading except one. Until now.
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
I like reading. A lot. Maybe too much.
I read just about everything, in damn near every format available. Short form. Long form. Essays. Software manuals — yes, I RTFM, and you probably should too. Physical books and magazines. Kindle books. Novels on the Books app on my iPhone and iPad. Audiobooks and podcasts during my commute. You get the idea.
I really enjoyed reading physical newspapers back when home delivery was still available in our area out here in rural southwest Iowa. Not going to lie, I still miss the smell of fresh newsprint and the feel of turning the pages of The Daily Nonpareil, Des Moines Register, Omaha World-Herald, and The Wall Street Journal in my hands. But I had to move on. We all did.
In the end, shifting technological landscapes and evolving business models come for all things.
Today, when I read all of those same newspapers and writers on my iPhone, iPad, or Mac, I understand that the content and writing that I enjoyed didn’t disappear. The way I received it and consumed it did.
For people who genuinely enjoy reading, that evolution has been both a blessing and a curse. It’s never been easier to discover great writing — or easier for it to be less enjoyable or disappear further into the noise within your screens or apps.
And unfortunately, this evolution has not exactly been ideal for us readers.
Have you tried to read your local newspaper online? Digital newspapers are mostly unreadable in a browser unless you use an ad blocker or even multiple types of ad blockers. The revenue model that shifted from ads in print and classified ads to ads on digital screens where there is no limit to how much cruft you can cram into an endless vertical scroll is super hostile and megabyte heavy. And that’s not even getting into the auto-play stuff. And please don’t misunderstand me, this isn’t a dig on the Web. This is a dig on how readers got the shaft from this digital shift.
So sometimes a better way for us to consume our favorite reading material is dedicated software built just for it. For newspapers and magazines, most have their own apps you download and it makes things much easier to consume without the ad-jacking and dickbars so long as you have a subscription.1 Digital books have their spaces and apps. And so do podcasts, RSS, and just about every other kind of medium and mechanism of consumption us reading nerds care about.
But some of the best writing on the Internet2 is still trapped in a weird and reading-hostile place. It hasn’t been able to make its own transition yet — primarily because of how it works and how it gets delivered and presented to you. It is absolutely the roundest peg in the squarest hole. It comes to you in software designed for back-and-forth conversations and replies and forwards. It sits in a list of 1,289 things, tucked between your utility bill that needs your click NAOW to make this month’s payment, and trying to decipher if the tempting juice from someone that apparently has an in with a Nigerian prince asking to meet up at an undisclosed location with a bag of cash or a money order or transfer of some crypto is worth the squeeze.
The Email Newsletter
The email newsletter. God bless ‘em. The little tiny weekly novellas. The baby books. The daily scoop on what’s happening. The screeds you signed up to read but never made or make time for. You know I’m right. I was guilty too, so don’t feel bad. Yet every few weeks I seem to subscribe to another one. Or twelve. Some teach me things. Some make me laugh. Some tell me about Merrell shoes that are 40% off — and don’t think I’m not clicking into that.3 Others simply make me think differently.
As the creation and consumption of writing has transitioned, newsletters have quietly become one of the best places to find thoughtful writing on the Internet. Journalists, analysts, researchers, software developers, investors, historians, independent creators, and nearly everyone else you can think of are publishing directly to readers via newsletters these days. There’s a newsletter for anything you want out there in this vast digital world, and it’s truly remarkable if reading and learning is your thang like it is for me. Sure, some of this is due to that digital transformation talked about earlier. But all of it is because these writers are bad asses and want to control their own destiny and hang out their shingle. I applaud and support anyone that goes this route. In fact, many of the writers I look forward to the most have either always been solo, or no longer publish for newspapers or magazines.4 They publish to an email list, website, podcast, or RSS feed — or some smart combination of all of these — direct to their readers.
Reading Isn't Processing
Newsletter readers need something different from their software. We don’t want something built around processing information. We don’t want tools for handling conversations, receipts, shipping notifications, password resets, calendar invites, or declining the offers from those pesky princes. Email is excellent at helping you empty an inbox and moving on. Processing. Taking action. But not reading. Email clients and apps are simply not built for quiet uninterrupted reading. Email is for triage and next steps and actions. Quick, rapid-fire types of processing and work. Get in and get out.
When someone spends hours researching and writing their newsletter or essay, the ideal experience they want for us the reader isn’t to file it away as quickly as possible, or worse, not even read it because we’re too busy doing inbox triage. It’s to open it and read it. To slow down. To highlight a passage. To maybe come back a week later to re-read something you remembered they had said that stuck with you. To make you laugh out loud. To offer a bit of respite in a crazy world. To remember where you saw their quote that you wanted to share. To feel engaged. To show you how they built that compost bin out of pallets. To feel like they wrote something just for you. To discover that new band they recommended that is like if Social Distortion and Fleet Foxes had a baby that got adopted by Chappell Roan.
To try to read newsletters in an email client is both a disservice to the writer and an exercise in futility: They want you to take time and enjoy them, but they’re trapped in a box that isn’t meant for that.5
Christopher M. Anderson
August 1, 2026
Notes
- ‘Dickbar’ is a term that I came to know from John Gruber of Daring Fireball. And why newspapers don’t offer an ad-free website for subscribers should be a crime. ↩
- I will die on the hill that the word Internet should be capitalized. ↩
- If there’s anything I like as much as a good, well-written newsletter it’s a great, well-built athletic shoe, and especially one on sale. Look, I’m almost 52 years old and it took me the first 42 to understand how important it is to have good and good-looking, comfortable shoes on your feet. Kids, take note. And Merrell, New Balance, Brooks, Adidas. Call me.📱 ↩
- The latest example I can think of is Joanna Stern with New Things. I’ve loved her writing for years at the WSJ — and following Walt Mossberg was no easy task but she absolutely did it and thrived. Her new venture is just as great and the fact that it’s nowhere around the Opinion writing of the WSJ is an amazing bonus. Not that I ever read that filthy shit anyway. Ugh. I like the WSJ for the business and tech coverage, not the owner’s politics. ↩
- It needs a different ‘boxx. I went there. ↩
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