6/30 Monday Quickie

*I'm a huge fan and avid consumer of email newsletters. For most of this year, I've been thinking around the idea of starting one, largely to replace writing here (I'd republish everything here anyway).

*The reason it's on my mind is because the NYT's David Carr is a similar newsletter fan and wrote about it today. If you aren't familiar, you should give it a read.

*FWIW, here are a few on my list:

Daily
*Jason Hirschhorn's MediaREDEF (media + tech + pop culture)
*Quartz (media, technology, business)
*NiemanLab (media and news)
*Alexis Madrigal's "5 Things" (serendipity)
*SB Nation's "Good Morning, Let's Basketball" (NBA)
*The Wire (news-feature discovery)
*Product Hunt (start-up discovery)
*American Press Institute (media and news)
*StrictlyVC (venture capital deals)
*Dan Primack's Term Sheet (VC news)
*The Skimm (clever news digest)
*Skift (Not even for its news on the travel-industry but as a model for how email newsletters can work.)

The ones I open most frequently/reliably are the ones where I'm not already getting their links on Twitter. For example, I love REDEF and NiemanLab, but some days, I don't need to open them because they are two of the Twitter feeds I pay most close attention to. Madrigal's "5 Things" probably gets my most reliable daily open, because he doesn't necessarily tweet out those links.

Weekly
*Benedict Evans (mobile industry)
*Monday Note (media)
*TheWirecutter and TheSweetHome

Paid
*Joe Sheehan's Baseball Newsletter

(That last one should be interesting to anyone who aspires to turn an email newsletter into a paid-subscriber-based business, as Jason Hirschhorn does.)

*I wish very much that 10 years ago I had focused more on turning the Daily Quickie into a daily newsletter -- to be honest, the technology to do it has been less-than-easy. That includes MailChimp, which I looked into when Quickish launched. TinyLetter feels like the closest thing to frictionless.(It's worth noting that TinyLetter is a product of MailChimp -- a very smart little productization.)

*I know Hirschhorn's basic business model is to develop a couple of high-audience vertical newsletters, then sell subscriptions to get them, but I think his ultimate upside is opening REDEF's platform to let anyone create a paid-subscriber newsletter, then taking a percentage of that revenue.

*I know it'll seem derivative and herd-following, but don't be surprised if I spark up a daily email newsletter in the weeks after the July 4th weekend.

-- D.S.