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 Their content is usually quite out of date by modern standards -- most folks are used to quicker information turnaround, on the order of hours or days, not months.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

[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.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I think that's common, and I confess that I'm a bit offended by it: we're not exactly burdened with excess volunteer labor, so wasting the time of people in all these Baronies seems like a really bad idea to me.

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...

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

You may have a point about the split between Chronicler and Web Minister. I may be responsible for that, at least in the East, as I proposed it to Curia during my tenure as Kingdom Chronicler. I'm not sure now if that predates the split at the Society level or not. At the time it seemed like a good solution to a number of issues - local chroniclers who were resistant to allowing web pages at all, power struggles between the chronicler and people wanting to put up a web site for the group, and a whole lot of stuff related to the web being a shiny, new technology that no one was quite sure how to use. I think splitting off the web minister position helped give it a chance to mature and become the useful thing it is today. However it may well be that the time for that split has passed, and we should rethink the division again.

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.

[jducoeur]

I may be responsible for that

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...

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

My first 'office' in the SCA was Deputy Chronicler... by virtue of being the only member of the Barony who could keep the mimeograph machine running. :) Since my persona was a sailor at one point, I'm currently 'Communications Officer, HMS Heronter' running the newsletter, the website, the Yahoo group and the Facebook page.

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.

[jducoeur]

Okay, so you're a good person to brainstorm on this. Would it be worthwhile to merge the various functions more deeply? For instance, thinking of the electronic media as part and parcel of the newsletter, so that those research articles would be initially distributed via the electronic media, with the newsletter serving as the journal of record?

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...

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

In Ostgardr, the chronicler (shalmestere) and the webmaster (me) sleep in the same bed, so there is usually semi-decent communication between them.

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.

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Sssshhh! If you're not careful, someone will pass a law banning Information-Officer Fraternization....

[matildalucet.livejournal.com]

A website is better for outsiders who want to read about the group and what's going on, or for those who hate Facebook. I don't know how many FB haters you have, so that might not work as an argument, but even FINDING a FB group that you think ought to exist can be nigh-on impossible.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I'm not surprised. While I haven't heard that specific argument locally, we have a *major* problem in the way that the email list and the Facebook group tend to carry on parallel conversations.

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...