Newsletters Are Awesome

an explanation about this, whatever this is

I remember signing up for my first newsletter. I was a kid in the 1980’s Bay Area, and I went to Oakland A’s games at the Coliseum.

One day we came back to our car in the parking lot and many cars around us had some piece of paper tucked under the windshield wipers. Except it wasn’t one piece of paper, it was several. It was like somebody had given away a newspaper.

We didn’t have whatever it was, and I don’t know why. Our car probably didn’t look like it belonged to whatever group the giveaway people were looking for. It was a boxy silver Ford Fairmount station wagon, and these newspaper-giveaway types were looking for people who wanted to read what they had to say.

There was nobody else around besides us, as we had left the game early, so it was easy for me to go snag one of those giveaway newspapers from another car.

What I saw when I opened it was a revelation. It was a newspaper devoted entirely to the A’s. I was confused and delighted. You could do this? I was used to reading the regular newspaper where you got one article per team every day, maybe two if you were lucky. Here was an entire publication that had nothing but stories on the same thing. Every story was related, somehow, to the A’s. It was magical. My parents told me there were many such things like this, and they were called newsletters.

As this was the 1980’s, this newsletter was typical for the time. Everything typed out, cut up, pasted on a different sheet and then photocopied- mimeographed, more likely. Since everything was copied at the same time, the photos always came out too dark. Any edits were obvious, and sometimes not even in the same font if a different typewriter was used for the re-written part.

That was another fascinating part. This was clearly not done by big-time pros, it was done by fans who just wanted to write about the team. They had some ability to publish- by that I mean somebody owned a Xerox machine or had a business where they could use a Xerox machine a lot without getting into much trouble- and they had the time to do this.

The return address was somebody’s house, and Mom was talked into sending a check to subscribe. It was probably $12 or some similar small amount.

I don’t remember how long the newsletter lasted. I don’t know if I still have any issues around somewhere (I’m going to say probably, but I have no idea where).

What I do know is that it felt like I was in a private club. It was a publication not designed for everybody else, it was designed for A’s fans, of which I was one.

Which is why I have always enjoyed newsletters since then. The marching band newsletters from my college days actually put in print the in-jokes and stories that we were telling. That means there’s a record of them, and we can find those jokes and remember them now- or wonder what on earth we were talking about.

That’s the point- you have to go find newsletters because they’re part of a group you’re already in. The newsletter writer doesn’t have to worry about attracting an audience- the audience has come and found the newsletter to specifically get something from it. The newsletter provides that something.

That’s why newsletters are better than blogs. You “stumble” on a blog. You find a newsletter.

So what are you going to find here? It depends on the day, the week, the mood, the hour. But you’re in the group, so expect it to be stuff you’re (generally) going to want to read about. I dug out the mimeograph machine and we’re going to see what happens.