I don’t do a lot of freelance writing these days, but last weekend, a friend hit me up to see if I could contribute a quick humor piece to a company’s newsletter. He’d already figured out the concept; all I had to do was write it. A container and some rules. Perfect. It’s the kind of thing he and I have done together dozens of times over the years in various outlets and various formats: print, online, newsletter.

But the more I looked past the shape of the piece, the more I realized that a dotted line runs from magazines—the media vessel of the past, like it or not—to newsletters, the media vessel of the present¹.

Magazine fans know what a “front of book” section is, even if they don’t know the name. Those are the quick-hit sections. They feature shorter pieces, lots of elements on a page, and generally feel busier than the rest of the issue. When you get to the “feature well,” the design shifts to keep you immersed in the longer pieces, generally with a two-column layout and maybe the occasional sidebar. In other words, where features are the entrées, FOB pieces are the appetizers. But if editors are doing their jobs well, each one of those appetizers distills a magazine’s overall sensibility. It’s a flavor bomb—powerfully enjoyable, but one that gets its point across in a single bite. You might think you. Another colleague of mine used to say that good FOB sections act as a spiritual table of contents for the magazine: simply by reading them, you knew the general vibe of what you were getting into later.

So in Wired‘s culture section, Start, which I worked on for my first few years at the magazine, you could find a a page mocked up to look like Yelp in Game of Thrones‘ Westeros. Or a poem about the sameness of disaster movies. These were both pegged to cultural happenings the month each issue hit newsstands, but they also embodied Wired‘s larger approach: irreverent, enthusiastic, and steeped in genre. Were they also an opportunity for me to be a smartass? Possibly².

Good newsletters, though, are at their best when they reverse that structure. They start with the “main bar”—the central element of the edition—and continue to shorter-form pieces. A great example of this comes from Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day, which is basically my lifeline to whatever’s happening in the various nano-niches that add up to Online Culture. In the most recent installation, the main bar clocks in at just under 900 words; after that comes a series of quick hits in the 100–300 word range. Each of those shorter bits is consistent with the newsletter’s overall scope and tone, just as FOB pieces are, but here they act as palate cleansers rather than table-setters. You open the email because you’re interested in whatever Ryan’s going deep on in the main bad, but by the time you’ve read through everything you feel reasonably up on the things that you wouldn’t possibly know otherwise but seem somehow indicative of where society is heading. (Spoiler: nowhere good!)

You can find this everywhere, from the massive to the micro, from business to humor, from Morning Brew to Backseat Freestyle. Sometimes the quick-hit bits are a linkdump, sometimes they’re mini-pieces in their own rights. (Some newsletters even break themselves into named sections, which for my money is a smart play: the more concrete vocabulary you can give someone to talk about the thing you make, the easier it is for them to recommend it to the next person.) But when you abstract away the words themselves and squint, these are basically magazines in reverse.

Importantly, this isn’t the only structure that great newsletters use, but it’s common enough that you’ll start seeing it everywhere you look. And it’s a staunch corrective to the idea that magazines faded because they’re static and fusty. The ideas are still big—it’s the pages that got small.

---

Tenuous Thematic Tie: The Heptones, “Book of Rules”

No disrespect to The Wailers, but it’s tough to find a vocal trio that means more to Jamaican music than the group that started life as The Hep Ones. Not only did they embody the musical shift from rocksteady to reggae, but lead vocalist Leroy Sibbles was a monster on the bass, and lent his skills to Studio One hits like “Full Up,” which would go on to be one of reggae’s foundational riddims. Like The Wailers, The Heptones signed with Island Records in the ’70s, part of the push that exported reggae around the globe; their Island album Night Food contained re-recorded versions of many of their classics, this gem among them.

1. Not the only one, obviously, but the one that—together with podcasts—best represents how journalists have adapted to the decline of print media and the rise of the creator economy. ↩︎
2. I worked on a handful of FOB sections over the years—GQ, Complex, King, Wired—but the one thing that they all had in common was that the editors putting it together tried, above all, to entertain each other. We would be reading these magazines if we didn’t work there, and so it wasn’t much of a jump to use ourselves as stand-ins for the reader. Focus testing was basically baked into the process. ↩︎