When Newsletters Were Printed

Today in Tedium: Some might say that peak newsletter came and went already, but in some ways, it just means the newsletter space is starting to right-size itself again. A recent piece on Vox’s Recode makes the case that newsletters are not the gold mine a lot of people once thought. “The scaled-down, sobered-up reality of newsletters is also sinking into media and tech companies that became newly interested in them over the last couple years,” the site’s Peter Kafka wrote. If that’s the case, well, it wouldn’t be the first time the newsletter emerged and receded into view. This is a cycle that has happened repeatedly over the last 100 years or so, even before newsletters became purely digital endeavors. And with all of that in mind and a new book on my shelf, I’d like to spend today’s Tedium looking back at some pre-digital newsletter efforts, and the parallels they might carry. Maybe it might offer a good refresher for my fellow newsletter authors out there. — Ernie @ Tedium

A sample of the Fugger newsletters, which were largely handwritten and shared across a network of merchants. If you want to dig in and can handle handwritten foreign languages, the letters have largely been archived online. (Austrian Science Fund)

The mercantile family that accidentally set the basic template for newsletters

You ever notice how a lot of newsletters appear to be about finance and various niche trades? While there are lots of other newsletters, like this one, those seem to be the most traditional types.

As you may be aware, one of the biggest newsletters on the block, Morning Brew, makes business and financial news its bread and butter. But it’s far from alone—newsletters are often great ways to deliver information in a periodic format, something that business and financial news tend to dominate.

While the newsletter concept started in personal letters in the days of the Roman Empire, which I’m sure was fun in an era long before modern or even last-gen copying techniques were used, the early days of the printing press in the 15th and 16th centuries were still an in-earnest time for publishers, who finally had a way to mass-produce information for large audiences.

And it turned out, strangely enough, that some of the early efforts to publish periodicals utilizing printing technology had many of the same goals as something like Morning Brew or my apparent nemesis, Axios. The concept of trade, whether on land or sea, allowed for the spread of information across borders and settings, made it a great vessel to deliver information broadly and consistently.

And that meant that there was a thriving newsletter trade long before everyone had an inbox. The most famous of this early generation of newsletters came from Renaissance Europe in the form of correspondence sent by the Fugger family, a family of mercantile bankers from Germany who also were early to another thing we often think of as highly modern—venture capital.

Eventually, all Substacks will be published this way. (Internet Archive)

To give you an idea of the legacy of the Fuggers, I submit a 2015 lead from a Reuters story: “Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have nothing on Jacob Fugger, a German financier during the Renaissance who monopolized the silver business, became the banker of kings, convinced the papacy to legalize moneylending and paved the way for today’s bond market.”

The Fuggers were a big enough deal that they had a network of correspondents around the world, and these correspondents would send letters in that mostly offered information on recent financial data and trades, but also dipped into political commentary. The commentary, collected by brothers Octavian Secundus and Philipp Eduard Fugger, is kind of like a newsletter but might also be compared to a telegram.

In the 1950s, Columbia University historian George Tennyson Matthews gathered up a number of these newsletters, which spoke to world events of the era, and published them in a book, titled News and Rumor in Renaissance Europe; the Fugger Newsletters.

Emphasizing that the recovered documents “are not what historians would call primary sources of evidence for the establishment of fact,” Matthews made it clear in a lengthy introduction that we were essentially reading gossip and commentary, rather than news:

The Fugger correspondents, whoever they may have been, display a certain consistency of attitude toward the great questions of politics, war and religion. Hawkins and Drake are not depicted as heroes, but as wild pirates preying upon the peaceful trade of Spain. The Huguenots of France are heretics and rebels, while the Sea-Beggars of Holland are outlaws. This is only natural, for the Fuggers were Catholic. They were loyal subjects of the Hapsburgs in Spain and in the Empire. They were bankers committed to the finance of states and the trade of regions, threatened by the eruption of the new powers of En land and the Dutch into an established commercial world which they had for decades dominated. The Fugger Newsletters were not objective pieces of reporting, and their writers frankly disclose their biases and interests, their joy or despair over every turn of events.

In many ways, we are essentially reading the equivalent of blog posts or newsletter commentary in the book, and not particularly objective commentary. The commentaries vary in length, some taking up multiple pages but others just a single paragraph. Here’s just one:

Unrest among the Miners in Schwaz

From Augsburg, the 20th day of December 1569.

In Schwaz it is rumoured that the miners are about to rise on account of the Religion which the Archduke in-tends to observe in his domain according to his own pleasure. That doth not please the overseers of the mines and they needs must incite the other poor simpletons to rebel. This can, however, soon be prevented by removing the foremen or bidding them follow the customs of the land in matters of religious observance and to keep their mouths tight shut. The others are to work or pray, whether they wish it or not, and therefore may well be kept within bounds.

In some ways, the Fuggers were prominent enough that they had their own network of quote-unquote “reporters” who were sharing information relevant to the family’s business but refracted through their own point of view—an approach not dissimilar to what we see from commentary blogs on the modern internet.

Separated from its original goals, it has taken on new historical context. It is a way for us to better understand how this prominent mercantile family and its associates saw the world, yes, but in many ways it shows that they were just as committed to relaying random crap without confirmation as we are now.

Can we talk about how awesome a name Howard Penn Hudson is? Just instantly memorable.

What a book about newsletters from 1982 can tell you about running a newsletter today

You may not know the name Howard Penn Hudson, even if you create newsletters today, but Hudson’s name carries a long shadow over what we call a newsletter.

A man whose lineage set him up for success in the way that anyone you might assume with the surnames “Penn” and “Hudson” might (he was reportedly related to William Penn and Henry Hudson, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson), he was seen as an icon of newsletter publishing, so much so that when he died in 2005, The Washington Post wrote this about him:

Mr. Hudson did not invent the modern newsletter—that honor goes to Willard M. Kiplinger, who started his first newsletter in the 1920s. But because of his timing and organizational ability, Mr. Hudson became the embodiment of the booming field.

Hudson was basically at the center of a broad cultural movement of niche newsletters that only got broader and more niche over time, even after its disruption by email in the 1990s and 2000s. He ran a newsletter about newsletters called The Newsletter on Newsletters (which he didn’t start himself, but purchased), and he was an educator focused on teaching others how to run newsletters themselves. On top of all that, he helped to found an association dedicated to niche newsletters in the 1970s, becoming one of the leading lights in the space of newsletters.

The only photo I could find of Hudson, alas. If I get another one, I will change it out. (St. Mary and Franklin Banner-Tribune/Newspapers.com)

And recently, I got a hold of his book about creating a successful newsletter business, titled Publishing Newsletters. (It’s on the Internet Archive in two separate editions, though through a controlled digital lending setup. If you’d like to read it, you’ll have to wait your turn.) The first edition, the one I have, came out in 1982, and it’s weird how much some of the things he talks about remain totally relevant 40 years later, despite completely being written before the revolution of the internet. From the book’s intro:

Newsletter writing requires precision and discipline, two factors missing from much student writing. It has a purpose: the communication of information in an understandable form to others. Students preparing their own newsletters would have the fun of seeing their words in print, and would learn both writing and the role of computers in information processing. They would also acquire a pleasant hobby and, if they sought a career in journalism, they would have had several years of practical experience before their first job interviews.

In his book, Hudson cites the Fugger newsletter as the first true newsletter, with Kiplinger setting off a broader trend in the 20th century. By the time Hudson was on board, the newsletter space was well-established, with the era of muckrakers such as George Seldes and Claud Cockburn already past. If I had to describe Hudson’s role in this sector, it might be as a mainstreamer and educator—he made the case for this market as a tool for building a business, rather than aggressive muckraking or the presentation of political information.

A Wired piece from 2020 described the time period in which Hudson had worked as such: “Newsletters had gone corporate. Trade associations cranked them out, as did big publishers like McGraw Hill.” In this 1982 book, Hudson, already a seasoned hand at this point, was clearly writing for the estimated one-third of newsletter publishers who failed each year.

I’m going to go into some more specific elements from the book in a list below, but broadly, this book is surprisingly relevant to running a newsletter in 2022. It talks a lot about tactics to help stretch your dollar, how to write more effectively for a given audience, how to decide on a niche, and who to target with your messaging.

If you were starting an email newsletter and this was your only resource, you might get a lot further than you think.