The team at WordPress wrote a post about a WordPress newsletter under the title Write And Publish Your Newsletter On WordPress.Com – and there were a lot of comments.
Here’s one from Allan
Hmm. This announcement is not what it seemed to promise to me. I was thinking that this WordPress.com Newsletter was a new product. I got excited: could I, at last, ditch MailChimp to compose separate newsletters? Would this be more integrated than the excellent MailPoet plugin?
No. It’s just an alternative landing page for a WordPress.com website. The “newsletter” is just an easier way to auto-send individual posts to a list of subscribers. (Except that you can make your “post” look like a “newsletter” if you wish.)
I then re-read the announcement, and true enough, the facts are all there. But it’s not what I had hoped for. And now I have to delete an additional WordPress.com account that I inadvertently (inevitably) created in trying out this re-presented product.
Mary asked these two questions:
1) If we set up a newsletter, are the newsletter subscribers different from our regular blog followers/email subscribers unless they sign up for the newsletter too? It sounds like it’s all separate which is a choice I’d like.
2)If we import our subscribers from another newsletter platform, who then, does subscriber information belong to, and what becomes of our Newsletter subscribers if we stop using the WordPress Newsletter?
And these were the replies
1) Newsletter and blog subscribers are one in the same, functionally, though they’re separated in the back end (https://wordpress.com/people/team) by “Followers” (who have a WordPress.com account) and “Email Subscribers” (who do not have a WordPress.com account).
2) The subscriber information always belongs to you! If you decide to stop using WordPress.com, you can always export your subscriber list.
Can you make head or tail of this? I can’t. But I like to follow my nose with something practical, so I set up a newsletter from scratch, and sure enough when I had finished it is just another WordPress website in my list of sites, the only difference being how it looks on the front end. It’s very minimal
Etymology interests me, and it keeps on interesting me, and that seems a great idea for a newsletter because I am interested and because I can make short and pithy posts, which don’t demand a lot of my readers.
I wanted These Old Words but when the available free sites came through I got offered these old thoughts dot WordPress dot com – so deciding not to be too precious, I grabbed it and I wrote my first etymology piece – on the origin of the word legacy
I am hoping to get lots of subscribers… so if you like the idea – click the image or the words and that will take you through to TheseOldThoughts and you can subscribe.
How Often Are You Going To Post?
That depends on how many subscribers I get – the more subscribers the more I will post. Word origins are great.
Postscript
Well, that didn’t last long. My experiment with the newsletter format has ended. I deleted the newsletter.
I just decided to do a bit of housecleaning and the newsletter was the first to go.
So now for general writing I have just two sites – In The Apple Tree and Photograph Works, and that’s it.
Happy New Year.
New Newsletter 29 January 2023
Where photography and politics collide – at Newsletters7
Photograph Works 
I was just recently reminded of Substack. I don’t wonder with this new features (Newsletter and Link in Bio specifically) if WPcom is attempting parity with other services. What are your feelings?
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I thought the same. Twitter just shut down Revue. That leaves Medium, and Ghost. I think it makes sense for a company like Automatic that is already in that coding space, but it seems a bit of a waste for a user to have to set up a separate domain to run a newsletter – a pity Automattic can’t make it an add-on – something like myblog.wordpress.com/newsletter. And then everyone could have a newsletter automatically, perhaps by toggling an on/off slider. ?
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Technically, I think we already do have a “newsletter” being subscribe by email. The newsletter sign up flow is a little different and there is a nice feature where you can import a CSV file with up to 100 email addresses for free, but it seems like a static front page with blog posts hidden from view. I certainly could be wrong.
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I think you are right – at least that is how it looks. – just like one could make with any blog, with the addition of a tailor-made sign-up button on the static front page.
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Would you sign up to Newsletters 7, then we can maybe see the workings of it actually operates?
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Yes I will, of course.
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I junked the newsletters I made – almost as soon as I made them. But… reading your comment got me started with something I think I will love (rather than a hamster wheel) and that is about where photography and politics collide.
https://newsletters7.wordpress.com
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Will take a look when I’m back on my computer. It’s an interesting topic for me.
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Three initial observations: When I landed on your newsletter signup page, I was logged in to WPcom, but it didn’t automatically populate the form with my email address. Second, I received an email confirming that I subscribed. Now usually when signing up for sites hosted on WPcom, I need to confirm my subscription, however, here that step was bypassed. Lastly, the subscription shows up in my “Followed sites” in the Reader. That’s all I have for now. 🙂
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Thanks – that’s interesting. If you receive the newsletter in your inbox then what about the double opt-in rules. And if it doesn’t arrive in your email inbox but only in Reader, then how is it not just a blog. I’ll try to get a post (sorry, newsletter) out in the next few days. Watch this space – but where? 🙂
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If we’re just testing for the sake of testing, a lorem ipsum post will do the job too. 🙂
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‘It’s true; a good idea.
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Done!
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Arrived by email and I also see it in the Reader. My default setting is only in the Reader, so the newsletters7 subscription overrides that. And yes, looking at the Reader setting for newsletters7, it shows “email me new posts instantly.”
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I wonder, is there an option change that to not get instant emails?
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It’s the standard Reader settings, so I imagine that it is possible to change that setting specifically for newsletters7. Shall I grab screenshots and send them to you?
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Yes, thanks.
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Done!
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I am using the Jetpack app on my phone – it is fast. Are you using it?
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Not yet. I’m backing up my save post to a private wordpress.com website before I do.
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