Blogging vs newsletters
There are very few people who hit ‘reply on my Thought Shrapnel email digests each week, but one who does it without fail is Bryan Alexander. We have a few back-and-forths every week, with the most recent involving us discussing how who has time to watch long videos, even if they’re awesome like this new Contrapoints video. Perhaps I’ll watch it in sections.
Which is exactly what I’ve been doing with this conversation between Jim Groom and Audrey Watters:
There’s some fantastic insights in there, and I’d encourage you to watch the whole thing. For the purposes of this post, though, just I want to surface something that Jim and Audrey talk about towards the end (around the 51 minute mark onwards):
Jim Groom: So do you think of the book as as a natural extension of your blog? Do you think of it as a completely separate project? Is that Audrey as historian? Is that Audrey as blogger coming in? Like, how do you think about that in terms of your writing career?
Audrey Watters: I do think of it as as somewhat separate, because I think I tried very hard to not let the the voice… that I tried very hard just to tell the story and to not comment every other paragraph, which would be like, “and this is exactly why you shouldn’t trust these jerks today.” So I’ve tried to do something more scholarly and a little bit more distanced from the from the Hack Education thing. I don’t know, I don’t know if I was successful, and I think I’m working on another new book right now in which I I’m definitely ready to unleash the ugly on the AI stuff. So…
Jim: I mean, I have to say, you know, the fact that you, your book was picked up by MIT Press, it was brilliantly reviewed, like… that will really be a scholarly contribution to the questions we’re dealing with now and the longer history of edtech.
Audrey: I hope so. I hope so. Yeah.
Jim: And so that’s interesting because that’s like you took your experience as a blogger, put that on the shelf for a while, and you reincarnated arguably not a whole different writer because it’s still you, but a whole different voice.
Audrey: Yeah, yeah.
Jim: That’s cool. I definitely commend that because that is not an easy task. I think that is pretty awesome. Just so you know.
Audrey: Thank you.
Jim: […] Now, you were also early to the to the gate with newsletters.
Audrey: Mhm.
Jim: You saw that coming early. And so you kind of made a shift. Not like your stuff still wasn’t online. It was. But you were like, “I don’t really give a shit about your comments. I don’t really need to live the blog game. And so I’m going to shift to the newsletter format.”
Audrey: Yeah.
Jim: And I’m interested in the different formats like the blogging format, the Twitter format, because you also had a very powerful voice in Twitter and then the newsletter formats. Do you think… oh, and then the book format, do you think of these all as different kinds of writings? Like, do you approach them differently? Like what’s your approach?
Audrey: Yeah, I do think about them. I do think about them really differently. I like the newsletter because I think of it as being like, “I’m just sending you an email,” which I know that some people are like, “Oh, email, that’s horrific. Please don’t.” But I think… or “I’m sending you a letter.” […] And I think that there’s something I think I really enjoy… I enjoy receiving newsletters from people. For some reason, it feels it feels personal, in a way, because it’s delivered to you. It feels slightly like a different kind of form than the blog post… which the blog post, as we all know, you put up there, and more than likely no one’s going to see it. RSS? Similarly, I think it delivers you a feed. The feed the feed part of blogging does feel quite similar to a newsletter where you get the news delivered to you. But blogging, man, you know, you’re just tagging it up there and you know, maybe someone will see it, but more than likely not. But the newsletter feels personal. Like I’m just… I’m sending and receiving a letter from somebody.
Note that this is my transcription, so check the words against the original video if you’re going to use them elsewhere, etc.
I think I need to change around the way I’m putting things out there, especially around getting into people’s inboxes in a way that feels more personal. Thanks, Audrey (and Jim!) as ever for the inspiration 🙏