{"id":4043,"date":"2014-11-07T11:10:39","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T11:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/?p=4043"},"modified":"2014-11-07T11:59:25","modified_gmt":"2014-11-07T11:59:25","slug":"news-by-email","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/news-by-email\/","title":{"rendered":"News by Email"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the one hand we keep hearing that email is dying. The young don’t use it, and anyway, we have an app for that.<\/p>\n

On the other hand it still feels pretty much impossible to do a lot of things without email. Where do your online purchase confirmations go? A myriad of apps? What if my friend isn’t on Facebook or Twitter?<\/p>\n

There seems to have been a bit of a flurry of emails recently in the quality end up the news market. A couple of weeks ago, the FT launched FirstFT – described as “your essential daily briefing.”<\/p>\n

It launched two weeks’ ago, and is sent out via email at 6am each weekday morning with a quick summary of top stories both on the FT.com website, and elsewhere. It replaced some previous email offerings.<\/p>\n

No sooner does that arrive then today we learn that The Economist has launched<\/a> The Economist Espresso. This is both an early morning email, and an Android\/iOS app that gives you a five minute summary of things that you need to know. Judging from their first day, no story is more than a couple of hundred words.<\/p>\n

THe difference between the two is that the FT’s service is free to all, although FT stories do come out of the small number of stories non-FT subscribers can read a month. Other links may be free. The Economist’s service is either \u00a32.49 a month on its own, or more usefully perhaps, free to current subscribers (of which I am).<\/p>\n

So yes, with The Economist Espresso, there’s an app as well as an email, but I think it’s interesting that email is still so important. That’s perhaps not surprising because however much people suggest that we can get our stories from social media, that becomes a lot harder if you have a broad social media footprint following or friending many people. An email still offers the ability to coral an array of stories or links into one place.<\/p>\n

For me, that one place has always most usefully been an RSS reader. That’s why I still use Feedly heavily – and indeed pay for a Pro account. But I’m aware that the wider community find something like a feed reader harder, even with apps like Flipboard taking some of that hard work out of the equation.<\/p>\n

Of course the FT and Economist are two of the latest of many news organisations that offer emails – The Guardian has a wide range of automatically generated emails. And then there are more authorial ones like the excellent Fiver. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the one hand we keep hearing that email is dying. The young don’t use it, and anyway, we have an app for that. On the other hand it still feels pretty much impossible to do a lot of things without email. Where do your online purchase confirmations go? A myriad of apps? What if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[137,324,293,323,116],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4043"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4043"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4045,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4043\/revisions\/4045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}