Nothing inspires this sense of helpless frustration more than Gmail’s Promotions folder: a sort of liminal purgatory into which the mailbox platform casts emails too bad for the inbox and too good for the spam folder. We just know that it’s always changing, and sometimes it’s good news and sometimes it’s bad news.” how they’re making decisions and how it will affect us from one day to another. Like some ancient, unknowable deity, Gmail “has this influence over our lives, but we don’t know. Newsletter writers talk about Gmail and its whims “the way that Greeks used to talk about Greek gods,” said one writer, who publishes a newsletter through Substack competitor MailChimp. There are still email providers to reckon with - in particular, Google’s free, wildly popular Gmail service. Yet the dream of a middleman-free media ecosystem is not so fully realized as its proponents might like to think. The newsletter platform Substack has secured tens of millions in venture capital, while smaller-scale players such as Ghost and Buttondown have carved out their own niches in the emerging market. It’s a trend that has made email sexy again, boosted earnings for a small cadre of name-brand writers and helped countless others supplement their incomes. Newspaper editors? Social media algorithms? No need to worry about these gatekeepers, the thinking goes, when you can just email your thoughts straight to whoever wants them.

The exodus has often been driven by frustrations with the various interlopers who stand between content creators and their audiences. Over the last year, a gathering parade of writers - including some of the biggest names in journalism - have abandoned traditional publications for the greener, less centralized pastures of independent newsletters.

Substack rss reader