The first PHSC Newsletter in early November 2001
Toronto. In the fall of 2001, journal editor Bob Lansdale felt that we needed a means to notify members and the interested public of the next Toronto meeting. To this end in early November 2001, he created his very first pdf, full colour, email newsletter. The added advantage to the pdf newsletter was that we could for the first time issue inexpensive colour images and reference them in the B&W Photographic Canadiana.
Now 16 years later, we still issue a newsletter to over 1,500 email addresses via MailChimp. The current editor is David Bridge whose personal site houses the newsletter as well.
Today in Saturday’s (yesterday) Globe, I read Simon Houpt’s column entitled “Facebook’s algorithm change gives new life to the e-mail newsletter” to discover that many organizations and businesses have reverted to the old newsletter concept over social media because of the better response. In fact, Haupt quote’s one newsletter publisher (twelve thirty six) with a 60% open rate – even higher than our own open rate which easily beats the industry average as quoted by MailChimp. A search on Google shows the wide interest these days in newsletters.
Our editor was truly a visionary those sixteen years ago…
