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 Their content is usually quite out of date by modern standards -- most folks are used to quicker information turnaround, on the order of hours or days, not months.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: 2011-11-30 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)