📰 Newsletter Audit: August 2020
Aug 02, 2020 • 3 min • Newsletters
I've written before about my fixation with newsletters. I've offered up some targeted recommendations for data-related content. What I hadn't done until now, is perform a full audit on my newsletter subscriptions and list them all out for you to explore.
We all get lots of emails and the line between newsletter and non-newsletter is becoming more and more blurry. For the sake of this audit, I'm viewing newsletters as emails that meet two requirements:
- Delivered directly to my inbox on a recurring and consistent schedule
- Delivered content is consistent across segments of subscribers
The first point here removes infrequent RSS-like emails that I receive with a new post from an author I like. While I do this quite a bit and look forward to these emails, I won't consider them newsletters here.
The second point exists to remove algorithm-driven digests from platforms like Quora, Medium, and Readwise. Once again, I do subscribe to a handful of these, but I won't include them in this post.
Now that we have the ground rules down, let's just jump into it. I've broken the subscriptions down semi-arbitrarily by topic and highlighted my personal favorites. There are also a few that I pay for, and I've marked those as well. Enjoy!
Business
- Alex Danco's Newsletter ⭐
- Everything Bundle 💰
- Stealing Signs
- Venture Desktop
- Not Boring
- Brian Balfour's Quick Takes
- Lenny's Newsletter 💰⭐️
- Stratechery 💰⭐️
- Trends.vc
- Benedict's Newsletter
- Social Studies
- Master the Meta
- Normcore Tech ⭐️
- Margins
- Kneeling Bus
Self-Improvement
- Recomendo
- Brain Pickings
- Wellness Wisdom
- Friday Finds
- Monday Musings ⭐️
- 5-Bullet Friday
- Austin Kleon's Newsletter
- 3-2-1 Newsletter
- Book Freak ⭐️
- The Art of Noticing
- The Monday Medley ⭐️
- Dense Discovery ⭐️
Programming
- Software Lead Weekly ⭐️
- JavaScript Weekly
- Pointer ⭐️
- Hacker News Digest ⭐️
- Frontend Focus
- PyCoder's Weekly
- CSS Tricks
Data Science
Product Design
News
Other
An Observation
One advantage of doing a comprehensive audit like this is that it brings blind spots and bias to your attention. It's pretty clear that the majority of the content I consume is written by white men. It benefits me and anyone that is reading this to seek out more diverse perspectives than this.
Newsletters are cool because they give you back control over what you consume and gets you out of algorithm-driven filter bubbles. But if you create those filter bubbles for yourself, what's the point? If you know of any awesome newsletters out there from authors in underrepresented groups, I would love to hear from you. 🙏
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