More on the email newsletter

Keyword: onlinejournalism. I'm a great fan of the email newsletter (see my previous posting on this topic), so it's good to see the OJR reporting that the form is seeing a resurgence, with quotes such as this:

"“E-mail is still the ‘killer ap’ for the Internet,” as far as Michael Odza, the Web publisher of Santa Fe's New Mexican, is concerned. The New Mexican, which has a circulation of 25,000, has 48,000 registered users for its Web site, and 11,000 of them have opted to receive an e-mailed version of the daily front page.

"That’s not a number that could reel in many ad dollars. “Local advertisers in our market have been reluctant to experiment” with e-mail ads anyway, said Odza in an e-mail interview. But the daily e-mail has helped draw traffic to the paper’s lively Web site, where the number of comments posted by readers has jumped from 50 to 200 a day in the last year."

- and this from Michael Zimbalist, president of the Online Publishers Association. :

"spam ... has cooled users’ interest in getting a lot of e-mail and has created a certain amount of resistance on the part of publishers and advertisers to go wild with it.”

- or, from Rob Runett, director of electronic media communications for the Newspaper Association of America:

“Newspapers’ e-mail messages are considered the gems among the muck of all the unsolicited inbox clutter that everyone’s receiving, because people are opting in, they’re requesting messages. E-mail messages sent by the newspaper’s online operation have become tremendous advertising and marketing tools.”

But it remains to be seen what impact RSS will have on the medium, with one newspaper's email newsletters "being outpaced both by RSS downloads and RSS click-throughs.”