I recently signed up to ‘Not a Newsletter’ by Dan Oshinsky, and I ❤️ it. Oshinsky is an email expert who has worked on newsletter strategy for BuzzFeed and The New Yorker. ‘Not a Newsletter’ has two things that make it stand out in my inbox:
- Oshinsky has deep knowledge about email, and the resources he shares are very useful. Email is an even more important channel than ever, both because social media is so unstable, and because there’s been a bit of a renaissance in newsletters due to Substack and similar services. It’s great to have access to someone with this level of expertise.
- The format is so different and unusual – it’s all in a Google Doc. Oshinsky sends a short email to notify you that it’s been updated and you click through to the Google Doc to read it. The smart thing about this is that I (and I’d guess many other readers too) leave the Google Doc open in a tab and keep coming back to it. It has much more ‘stickiness’ than an email which disappears as soon as you move on to the next message.