Having designed and written many newsletters over the years, they are not the daunting task that they might be to others. Mind you, there is a need for a newsletter editor to have more skills than just the ability to get your Christmas cards out on time. Maybe it will be helpful to take a look at what it takes to produce a newsletter.
It is important to understand the difference between a newsletter and a newspaper. A newspaper is a collection of information of interest to a broad community. It covers many topics. In our society, it is usually supported by advertisers who also want to reach consumers among that community. The reader reads those aspects of the newspaper that are of interest and simply ignores the rest.
A newsletter has a much narrower focus. It is designed for a community of interest. It can be a community of workers in a company, a union, a medical specialty, an engineering discipline, a health agency, a church, a community organization, a political party, users of a local sports facility or a condominium. Whatever the group, the newsletter deals specifically with information of interest to these individuals. Before each issue is prepared, the editor asks the question: What do the readers want and need to know? It is only self-edited in terms of the time people can give to digesting the newsletter content. That is why you start with the most important information and leave the minor stuff for the back pages.
Most good newsletter editors assemble the background information on what needs to be in an issue and write the articles in a steady flow. Having different people write various parts of a newsletter actually takes longer as the editor has to meld their input with the rest. A newsletter can be full tabloid size, a glossy magazine format or as simple as a few photocopied pages. It all depends on the budget and the amount of material that needs to be distributed to the readers.
There is a long-standing adage among people who write and prepare company and organization newsletters for a living. (Yes, these are best done by professionals.) Their maxim is that, when in doubt, you run the president’s picture larger.
Regrettably, newsletters are too often ego trips for those who pay for them. If the president’s message takes up the entire front page, the organization has a problem. This is especially serious if the president’s writing never got past a fourth grade level of thinking and nobody edits him or her.
There is no excuse for a newsletter that is full of gross grammatical errors, self aggrandizement, inappropriate wording and inaccurate information. People who think the spell check on the computer can save them have no idea of the embarrassment their bad spelling can cause. And as for punctuation, this can sometimes be a lost cause!
In teaching executives to write effective letters over the years, there have always been some basics that apply equally to newsletters: You never say “I.” You never apologize—unless you include your resignation. And never get off subject.
A good newsletter makes people proud of the organization. A bunch of typos, surrounded by blather, can annoy them.
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