Are newsletters obsolete?
Nov. 29th, 2011 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurOkay, time to toss out a point that may be controversial. (Or might not -- I'm curious.) As I read through the new Society Policy on Kingdom Newsletters, I am coming to the conclusion that the whole concept has failed to keep pace with reality. SCA newsletter policy -- indeed, the whole way we think about such things -- feels like those poor newspapers that are flailing around, trying to stay relevant in an age that has passed them by. And like them, I think we need a complete rethink.
So here's an assertion: "newsletters" no longer make much sense in the current SCA. Sure, there are some warm fuzzies from getting them, but most people, most of the time, ignore them. Their content is usually quite out of date by modern standards -- most folks are used to quicker information turnaround, on the order of hours or days, not months. They tend to be full of boilerplate that is mostly better obtained from websites. They are mired in red tape that discourages the sort of creativity that would make people actually interested in them. And they're decoupled from the ways people really are communicating: email, websites, social networks, and so on.
Yes, there are exceptions, and yes, I'm aware that not everyone in the world is Internet-connected. But not everyone has reliable addresses or phone numbers, and that doesn't stop us from building our procedures around those assumptions. Everything in the world has exceptions; if you try to cover every one of them, you'll just wind up with a mess.
That said, newsletters used to serve a really important purpose: as a *common* communications mechanism. You could usually assume that all the really active members of Carolingia not only received but paid at least some attention to the Minuscule; and while not everybody *read* Pikestaff on a regular basis, almost everybody had it, and in the pre-GPS days most people used it regularly for directions to events. That served as social glue that we are sorely lacking nowadays, scattered as we are across dozens of mailing lists, websites, social networks and what have you.
What's the solution? I don't know, but I'm looking for ideas. Can we at least partly unify the communications, so that you could follow Carolingia via email or Facebook and participate in the same conversations? Could we build the Minuscule partly/entirely as a summary of those conversations -- a sort of official record of what's going on?
Other ideas? How can we recognize the reality of modern communications, and weave together something that is actually *useful* to us, that could help us unify instead of just fracturing further?
(I'm aware that SCA rules and regs might interfere with this. Ignore that part: this may be one of those times where Carolingia could helpfully lead by example, if we can come up with some good ideas...)
So here's an assertion: "newsletters" no longer make much sense in the current SCA. Sure, there are some warm fuzzies from getting them, but most people, most of the time, ignore them. Their content is usually quite out of date by modern standards -- most folks are used to quicker information turnaround, on the order of hours or days, not months. They tend to be full of boilerplate that is mostly better obtained from websites. They are mired in red tape that discourages the sort of creativity that would make people actually interested in them. And they're decoupled from the ways people really are communicating: email, websites, social networks, and so on.
Yes, there are exceptions, and yes, I'm aware that not everyone in the world is Internet-connected. But not everyone has reliable addresses or phone numbers, and that doesn't stop us from building our procedures around those assumptions. Everything in the world has exceptions; if you try to cover every one of them, you'll just wind up with a mess.
That said, newsletters used to serve a really important purpose: as a *common* communications mechanism. You could usually assume that all the really active members of Carolingia not only received but paid at least some attention to the Minuscule; and while not everybody *read* Pikestaff on a regular basis, almost everybody had it, and in the pre-GPS days most people used it regularly for directions to events. That served as social glue that we are sorely lacking nowadays, scattered as we are across dozens of mailing lists, websites, social networks and what have you.
What's the solution? I don't know, but I'm looking for ideas. Can we at least partly unify the communications, so that you could follow Carolingia via email or Facebook and participate in the same conversations? Could we build the Minuscule partly/entirely as a summary of those conversations -- a sort of official record of what's going on?
Other ideas? How can we recognize the reality of modern communications, and weave together something that is actually *useful* to us, that could help us unify instead of just fracturing further?
(I'm aware that SCA rules and regs might interfere with this. Ignore that part: this may be one of those times where Carolingia could helpfully lead by example, if we can come up with some good ideas...)
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-29 09:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-29 09:35 pm (UTC)But that's clearly going to fall by the wayside as newsletters move online, and there are surely less wasteful ways to deal with this need...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 01:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 05:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-29 11:09 pm (UTC)I see a major change here from when I was Chronicler for Stonemarche back in the early 90's. Back then I still wasn't overwhelmed with submissions, but I didn't have to chase people quite so hard. Officers at least had things they wanted announced. Now I feel very much like the sole contribution I'm making by producing the newsletter is filling a check-box on the corporate policy that lets us keep being a Barony. It' very de-motivating.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-29 11:18 pm (UTC)And yet, on the flip side, I kind of feel like there is an open ecological niche here -- that we still need something *like* newsletters to help draw us together. The question is, what should we be doing that is actually useful and interesting to our members, not just wasting officers' time?
One fundamental problem may be the office split between Chronicler and Webminister, which has been institutionalized all up and down the chain. I'd bet that replacing both jobs with a single one in charge of "communications", as a general concept, would do us a world of good, simply by shaking up our assumptions and encouraging folks to think in terms of the problem, not in terms of specific media...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-29 11:27 pm (UTC)I think there's one huge fly in the ointment though - right now the positions of both Chronicler and Web Minister come with a lot of very specific rules handed down from above, aimed at letting the SCA, Inc. keep control of its public image. It would be much more challenging to codify rules for a general communications position, and therefore I think it will be resisted strenuously at top levels.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 02:47 pm (UTC)I wouldn't worry about it -- at the time, most of us thought it was a good idea. That was a *long* time ago (at least, in Internet time), and nobody could predict the way that online communications would grow and fragment, and consume the Society. (Remember that I was deeply involved there from the beginning -- my Carolingian site *may* have been the first SCA webpage -- and I completely agreed with the split.)
But yes: it's probably time for a rethink. The split was probably a good idea for ten years or so, but at this point it's likely harming both sides of the equation. We probably need to redefine Chronicler to be in charge of communication more broadly, with a lot more freedom to explore how to make that work best. It's "let a thousand flowers bloom" time -- lots of experiments needed to see what works.
As for resistance from the top: quite likely, but I suspect the Board is more open to experimentation than you think. Far as I can tell, they are finally genuinely *scared*, and for the right reasons -- it is clear that the Society is getting dysfunctional, and I believe they are more aware of that than most people give them credit for. So while I agree that the bureaucracy is likely to resist it, I suspect that the Board would be open to principled arguments for experimentation and change...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 01:41 am (UTC)I do feel that the newsletter is becoming obsolete. I only produce five paper copies an issue, the rest being distributed electronically. As has been said, oftimes the information is available on the web. As a matter of fact, almost all of the Event Announcements I run are lifted from the sponsoring group's website.
To my mind, the only truely useful functions of the newsletter are 1.) the Shire News page where upcoming birthdays and recent funerals are mentioned as well as various shire accomplishments such as winning awards and competitions and 2.) it's really the only place that a research article can be distributed. Granted, I can and do post my cooking articles on my own website, but I know that's pretty much a vanity page with few readers. By publishing in a newsletter, I can delude myself into thinking people are reading it.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 02:56 pm (UTC)Basically, I'm finding myself thinking that the main advantage of a newsletter is a sort of permanence: it describes things chronologically in a way that online doesn't quite, and it *summarizes* in a way that online doesn't. But I'm not sure there is any information that belongs *solely* in a newsletter. Hence my "journal of record" viewpoint -- a model where the newsletter is the curated record of what was considered important from a given period...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 01:42 pm (UTC)But as the former has pointed out, we've had officers saying recently "nobody actually READS the web site; why not convert it to a Facebook group so people will use it?" in other words, not only is the dead-tree newsletter considered an obsolete medium (we have something like thirty subscriptions out of hundreds of members, and half of those are ex officio), but even the Web is considered an obsolete medium.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 01:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 02:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 02:58 pm (UTC)It feels to me like unification of the media is desperately needed, in many respects. Unfortunately, the online information providers do a really good job of preventing that from working easily...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-29 11:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 12:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 01:55 pm (UTC)What are these "volunteers" of which you speak?
:-D
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 03:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 03:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 04:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 04:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 03:03 pm (UTC)The problem is, that results in even fewer people paying any real attention to it: it's almost completely vestigial by now. So I'm pondering how we might completely redefine it, into something that people might actually care about...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 03:27 pm (UTC)This is of course not counting anyone who might print their own copy at home for whatever reason, though I can't see why anyone would bother.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 05:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 06:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 06:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 06:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 06:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-01 02:58 pm (UTC)And yes, this is one area where I think policy is lagging reality, and the newsletter requirements are a burdensome waste of resources on a huge scale.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 02:51 am (UTC)The fragmentation problem is real, and I don't know what to do about it. We aren't even quite at the point of being able to just syndicate everything to one web site automatically -- even if Facebook, Twitter, and email lists supported RSS or something like it, the norms of usage among those are too different so you'd get gibberish. Central gathering requires a curator -- that would be a useful thing for a chronicler to do, but staying on top of it would be a ton of work and it's not useful if somebody doesn't stay on top of it, so I don't know what the path is. Wikis, perhaps, but that risks just creating more fragments.
Sigh.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-01 05:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-02 03:21 am (UTC)Has this changed? When I was kingdom chronicler (a long time ago, granted), the requirement was that baronies and above (but not shires and below) have chroniclers. It didn't actually require newsletters to be published -- a fact I noted and decided to remain quiet about. :-)
You might reasonably point out that a chronicler without a newsletter isn't doing an awful lot -- and I'd counter with A&S officer in many groups.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-02 08:23 am (UTC)So yes, at least within the East, local groups are (or were) required to publish a newsletter at least quarterly.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-02 08:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-02 06:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-06 06:31 pm (UTC)Something I also pointed out when I wrote my infamous "Principality to Kingdom" series. Why have a herald when everyone locally has arms? And those who don't usually wait for an event anyway. Why require a marshal when you don't require a barony to have fighters? Or tournaments?
-- Dagonell
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-06 07:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 07:43 am (UTC)as for an answer to your question on using the newsletter to summarize other conversations - i like the idea ... to a degree. In this world of immediate gratification, people have conversations and then are done with them. Therefore, to summarize conversations that have been had will bring people who are out of the loop into an old loop - up to 3 weeks old. This doesn't SOUND like much, but can you remember a conversation from 3 weeks ago? I can't. but, that does bring up the next point. maybe things should be discussed more than once. It gives people come time to mull things about in their heads and then maybe change their opinions... or something.
I don't know what the answer to unification is. And my brain is now slowing down enough for bad star trek puns to sound like good answers, so I'm going to cut it off here.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 03:23 pm (UTC)Note that that's about to happen here as well -- starting in January, you can receive Pikestaff as online-only. The question is, once that happens, how many people will pay any attention to it at all? My guess is few.
If you're looking for an SCA example, the Barony of Iron Bog put the Iron Monger online so that people could just go to the website and read it from there.
Carolingia actually made more or less the same switch a few years back.
In this world of immediate gratification, people have conversations and then are done with them.
True, and I can't claim that I've thought this through completely. But that's sort of where this "journal of record" idea is coming from -- not so much a continuation of the conversation as a record that it happened. That's potentially useful as a historical resource. (Or not: it may be that the whole idea is daft.)
Another Chronicler Weighs In...
Date: 2011-11-30 01:49 pm (UTC)I've been a local newsletter editor approximately since I moved to the East (16 years, give or take 6 months). Frankly, Chronicler* is the only Scadian office I'm interested in holding because
(1) I can aggregate info about Actual Period Stuff(tm)--museum exhibits, concerts, plays--as well as Scadian info (admittedly, there are only a few locations in the U.S. where I could do this--NYC, DC, Boston, maybe Bay Area);
(2) I can provide an outlet for the creative work of local cooks, poets etc. (I am fortunate to have several talented and generous writers in the Province);
(3) I derive some aesthetic satisfaction from producing an attractively-laid-out publication.
Sadly, the rules and regs coming down from the Corporate level (wrt photo/article release forms, "advertising" anything that charges admission, etc.) are making the job less fun, and that, if anything, may eventually convince me to quit :-/
A propos not much, I have never published an electronic newsletter, partly because I don't have coding chops (although I know enough HTML now that I could do what I wanted to do with that and some boilerplate code), but also because the law [Corporate, or just EK?] says that hardcopy must be provided to anyone who asks, and IME the best e-newsletters (i.e. the ones that *aren't* PDFs) don't look good printed out, and the best print newsletters don't look good in e-mail (see (3) above :-D).
That said, I do agree that a periodical newsletter is not the place for time-critical information, but I believe that it is still a viable medium for feature articles, artwork and the like. Further, I believe that it's not enough to say "print newsletters are obsolete," because information technology is changing rapidly enough that any other medium we choose is on its way to obsolescence, as well (Case in point: at an Ostgardr Commons last spring, someone said to
____________
*Maybe also Webmaster, now that one can use WYSIWYG webpage software
+
Re: Another Chronicler Weighs In...
Date: 2011-11-30 03:32 pm (UTC)So the implication there is that newsletters as traditionally conceived probably shouldn't be mandatory, but they shouldn't be prevented either. Having far fewer of them, solely run by the people who *want* to do them, would likely provide everyone with a much healthier model of the way the concept should be expressed...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 02:53 pm (UTC)Can we at least partly unify the communications, so that you could follow Carolingia via email or Facebook and participate in the same conversations?
Sure you can. vBulletin (or some similar package) would handle the thing nicely. You put together a news website, with the various relevant people allowed to publish news items. Those items appear on the site's front page, as well as being tweeted and sent to Facebook. You then have threaded discussion forums behind that news site (and a thread for each published news item by default). All nice and searchable for folks who are interested in digging through for old information.
One could subscribe to various forums or threads to watch for new items coming in (so, say your Guild has a thread for announcements - anyone subscribed gets an e-mail about a new post in that thread, just like they were on an e-mail list, but you don't have to be on the list to find that thread if you aren't in the guild)
News items, discussions, and archives of all of it all in once place.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 03:47 pm (UTC)My most immediate concern, really, is the follow-on conversations. While there are well-established ways to cross-post the headers, I haven't yet seen a really *effective* technique for keeping the ensuing discussion together, and peoples' instincts are to respond using the same technology they receive in.
The key is to avoid wishful thinking. It's really easy to tell people, "You should all respond here!" -- but very nearly impossible to actually get them to do so unless you make it very convenient to actually do so. I suspect some experimentation is needed to figure out what's necessary to make that work. (If it's possible at all; I don't assume that it is, although I am hopeful.)
Really, what I *want* is for Facebook et al to adopt the Salmon Protocol, which addresses exactly these problems. (It provides a way for responses to propagate around.) Unfortunately, there's probably a snowball's chance of that: the social networks try very hard to keep their walled gardens walled, and hence actively promote fragmentation. But that's a whole 'nother rant...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 04:39 pm (UTC)When you had a physical newsletter, you had no conversation tied to the item at all, and somehow the world failed to end. With search features, tags, topic categories and topic-dedicated forums, finding stuff on a discussion forum isn't all that difficult.
Facebook does not allow messages to be propagated and aggregated in another system, and in any event Facebook's delivery really isn't suitable for more than exchange of short messages - long and reasoned discussions from many people is not it's forte. The fact that everyone is on Facebook doesn't make it the place you want to hold your conversations. It is at best an entry point, and should be viewed as such.
You can, of course, help the system along somewhat. Don't send out the entire news item (for Twitter, you *can't* send out the full item). Send out a headline, maybe an abstract, and a link to the full article. Interested parties click the link and are taken directly to the item of interest, which also happens to be the context for engaging in conversation, so it is pretty seamless for the user.
I'm not specifically a booster for vBulletin. That's simply the system I'm most familiar with. Pick the package that does what you want best, of course.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 05:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 08:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-30 07:53 pm (UTC)Yea being in a very remote shire can be kind of hard.