What Is a TinyLetter? Like Ye Olde Blog, but Less Public
“If there’s one silver lining in this whole thing: Donald Trump has cured my Impostor Syndrome,” Maris Kreizman, the editorial director of the Book of the Month Club, wrote this past week in her personal email newsletter, “The Maris Review.” “If he thinks he’s qualified to run this country, I can do whatever I want.”
In the beginning, there was the holiday letter, an annual mimeographed review delivered by post to a roster of relatives and friends.
Then, from the late 1990s through the aughts, came the periodic mass-email update: often deployed by backpacking or otherwise soul-searching 20-somethings, easy and free to disseminate, with recipients blind carbon-copied to prevent a vicious Reply All cycle.
This was followed by the advent of blogs, and the private suddenly went public. These were soon usurped by social networking applications, especially Facebook, which enabled even the technically challenged to relay news about their lives to a wide spectrum of people, not always their intimates, and at more frequent intervals.
But there was more to come. We now find ourselves in the era of the personal email newsletter, an almost retro delivery system that blurs borders between the public and the private, and mashes up characteristics of the analog and digital ages.
