Are newsletters obsolete?

[jducoeur]

Okay, 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 Their content is usually quite out of date by modern standards -- most folks are used to quicker information turnaround, on the order of hours or days, not months.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...)

Comments

[tpau]

well you are missing an important use for things like the Pale and the Pikestaff, which is proof of membership. something like half of folks at pennsic use them as that at Troll. people keep them in their car for this purpose.

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

I have to say that as the current Chronicler in Stonemarche I feel singularly obsolete. I'm putting out a newsletter that I'm not sure anyone actually cares about, except maybe that I'm providing a regular compendium of links to all the on-line information about the Barony. Most of what I print is lifted from public announcements in one on-line source or another.

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.

[dulcinbradbury.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on this. I rarely even look at my pikestaff. I'm a web girl -- for the love of fish please put things up where I can skim and search for things.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I have to say, I'm glad I was Chronicler of Carolingia in the heyday of desktop publishing. If I had that job today, I'd be incredibly frustrated: I expect contributors are even harder to come by — and volunteers to help with collation and mailing doubly so. I would very much want to be jointly and simultaneously publishing it online — and would probably feel compelled to default to the ungainly but least-effort approach of putting pdfs online.

[cellio]

I also think newsletters have become obsolete, and publishing an online newsletter is the worst of all worlds -- the information is more accessible on web sites than in a PDF and is likely more timely, and the requirement to publish the PDF is a waste of volunteer efforts for an unneeded product. They should remove chronicler from the list of required offices and let each group decide what it wants to do. (Debatable Lands publishes a digital newsletter; the last time I asked why we bother I got a mix of shrugs and "sentimental value", but nobody really saying it's useful. I don't know why our chronicler -- who is a wonderful person who contributes to the group in other ways too -- still does it.)

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.

[unicornpearlz.livejournal.com]

At 2:32am i don't have any witty or really thought through answers. however, i do know that one of the best things i've seen done with the newsletter is it being posted online. I don't just mean in the SCA. This particular issue is being dealt with in many different associations. The Medical Historical Society of NJ, for example has an opt-out program, where you can opt-out of receiving the paper copy and only receive it electronically (via email). Meanwhile the most recent meeting of the American Association of the History of Medicine voted on keeping the Bulletin of Medicine in paper format, so that it didn't get brushed aside with so many of the online/electronic newsletters people get. (But in the AAHM's case, this is not a 3-5, or even a 10-15 page document. It's closer to a 100-150 page document, so that made more sense. The National Association for Pediatric Nurse Practitioners, have an opt-in program. They made it so everyone with an email automatically received the newsletter via email, unless they specifically requested to receive a paper copy as well. 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. (That was years back, though and i don't know if its done anymore.)

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.

Another Chronicler Weighs In...

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

...with a Non-Carolingian perspective :-)

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 hudebnik "You know, nobodylooks at the website anymore--why don't you create a Facebook group?"+). I suspect that the solution is (as someone here suggested) to have an Information Officer who is flexible and willing to Web, blog, tweet or [Next Big Thing] the information the populace wants/needs.
____________
*Maybe also Webmaster, now that one can use WYSIWYG webpage software

+hudebnik replied, "Because I'm not on Facebook" :->

[umbran.livejournal.com]

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.

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

I'm inactive these days due to my shire going away. But when I was active and got the Dragon's tale on average it took me about 15 seconds to read the whole thing. 95% of it was event annoucments which were ether in my shire, in which case I probably wrote it. Or were several hours flight away.

Yea being in a very remote shire can be kind of hard.