For the past few years, newsletters have become the preferred format for newsrooms eager to escape their dependence on social media. A direct space, stable, with no algorithm to filter information. But is this honeymoon threatened by the "AI-fication" of inboxes? 404 Media's cofounder is already losing sleep over it, and several newsrooms say they're preparing for it: a messaging system that automatically sorts, summarizes, and prioritizes emails, promising to spare users the daily flood of information and the hassle of sifting through a chronological feed to find what matters to them. All thanks to an automated assistant, integrated directly into the interface, that would decide—in place of the media—what deserves our attention. "Auto-mailization," a real risk or exaggerated fear?
Changes ahead
Media outlets had placed great hopes in this format. Tired of seeing opaque algorithms dictate how their content is distributed, many newsrooms saw email as a direct and reliable way to reach their readers and build a stronger, more lasting relationship… until AI came along and tech companies started injecting AI everywhere (whether due to ephemeral hype or not, time will tell). After search result summaries on Google and notifications summarized by Apple using AI, will mailboxes be next to run through the automation mill?
A wave of startups is already promising to "revolutionize" these spaces by sorting, summarizing, or responding on our behalf using AI, and the firms dominating the market have no intention of missing out on the "progress" bandwagon. Last August, Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, spoke of the "next generation of email" that his team was working on: a way to reply to your emails on your behalf, mimicking your style, and turning the tedious task of managing your inbox into a thing of the past. The company has already started displaying summaries of long emails and conversations in Gmail in a box appearing at the top of messages.
Newsrooms questioning themselves
As Adweek reported last March, some companies and newsrooms are already thinking about how to adapt their strategies so their newsletters continue to reach their subscribers. A turning point for a format that had so far been spared the optimization logic of SEO and social media. It's no longer about worrying whether emails end up in spam; now you have to hope that AIs pick up the right information and ensure your email appears in automated summaries. In the case of Morning Brew, their main advantage would lie in how they design their newsletters, meant to be fully consumed in the inbox without requiring a redirect to an external site. An interesting characteristic for Google or Apple, whose goal is to keep users within their ecosystem.
For Jason Koebler, founder of 404 Media, the risk is very real. The media outlet, dedicated to tech news, thought it had found in the newsletter an antidote to AI. Its investigations were regularly scraped by bots and then automatically republished on other sites, sometimes with better search rankings. To address this, the outlet had instituted a registration wall and encouraged readers to subscribe. Now, the editorial team fears seeing AI pursue them all the way into email inboxes and is already considering other avenues to work around them, such as using RSS feeds.
Reasons to hope
All is not lost, quite the opposite. If newsletters have found their audience, it's because they offer media something social networks no longer really allow: control over how information is presented and delivered. A newsletter can be a mini publication: an editorial selection curated by the newsroom, with a hierarchy, order, and pace determined by the editorial team. And if this format works, it's also because readers want it. A particular use and expectation will likely prevent email inboxes from being completely transformed into social networks.
Also, we shouldn't forget what makes email inherently powerful: a format that is free by nature, by design. Despite Google and Apple's dominance (between 70% and 90% according to various studies), email remains an open, decentralized medium independent of any single platform. There's been a lot of talk about the "fediverse" and "decentralized" networks like Mastodon or Bluesky, which allow their users to communicate with each other. But email already works that way: Gmail users can write to those using Proton or Yahoo. Yet this hasn't prevented a handful of major corporations from dominating the market. The newsletter is not a magic solution, and we tend to act as if our emails weren't being delivered directly into the hands of Google and Apple.
Reclaim your email
We are not condemned to endure this situation. Email portability is a rare asset on today's web, and we must seize it. How? By informing readers: reminding them that email is an open format, that alternatives exist, and that they can take control of how they receive our content. Should we bet on something else as 404 Media suggests? Abandoning email and betting on alternatives like RSS feeds, on the grounds that it's being mistreated by a few corporations, would be moving the problem rather than solving it (and some RSS readers are beginning to integrate AI too). We must not be mistaken about the real fight: the problem is not email itself, but the methods of the corporations that govern its use.
A good opportunity as well to remind ourselves that we need to stay vigilant: just because a tool is open or decentralized doesn't mean it's safe from being monopolized by large corporations. Threads, Meta's social network, for example recently joined the fediverse. But did Mark Zuckerberg, who spent years building closed and centralized platforms, wake up one morning suddenly and genuinely passionate about an open and independent web? Or is he instead trying to seize the territory right now, to better lock down a new strategic space, the way Google did with Gmail? The jury is still out.
To go further
- As competition for attention intensifies, media outlets are inventing new ways to maintain reader engagement on their own platforms. Watch the video of the 404 Media cofounder's talk, alongside El Pais, The Economist, and Hanna Tameez from the Nieman Lab.
- How to make the most of the newsletter format? Some ideas and best practices for a well-designed newsletter.
