David Carr, media columnist for The New York Times, today wrote a column titled “For Email Newsletters, A Death Greatly Exaggerated.”
《纽约时报》（ The New York Times）媒体专栏作家大卫o卡尔日前撰文《电邮通讯已死的说法纯属夸大其词》。
My first reaction was, “Thank goodness, since I’m paid to write an email newsletter.” My second reaction was, “Wait. Huh?”
我看到这篇文章的第一反应是：“谢天谢地，我可是靠写电邮通讯赚钱呢。”我的第二反应则是：“等等。真的吗？”
For the past twelve years, I’ve written a morning email newsletter focused on the venture capital and private equity industries. It began with a few dozen readers and now has over 50,000 (being completely rebuilt from scratch a few years back, after I changed employers). For most of those years it has been profitable, in that my salary is its only substantial expense. If email newsletters were on the precipice of the Great Beyond, no one bothered to tell me, my readers or my advertisers.
过去十二年，我一直在写一份专门报道风险投资和私募股权行业的早间电邮通讯。起初只有几十位读者，如今读者数已经超过50,000人（几年前我换了雇主之后完全从头做起的）。这么些年来，大部分时间都是盈利的，因为我的工资是它唯一一项大的支出。如果说电邮通讯快挂了，那怎么没人告诉我、我的读者还有我的广告客户？
Look, I get Carr’s point. Email isn’t as sexy as snaps, as trendy as tweets or as pretty as pins. In theory, it should have gone the way of Palm Pilots. But the reality is that email newsletters not only have persevered, but never were actually under threat. The fact that so many new ones are launching now only reflects widespread recognition of a model that has worked for more than a decade, rather than some sort of unexpected reclamation project.
我明白卡尔的意思。电子邮件没有快照性感，不如Twitter消息时髦，也没有“钉图片”漂亮。理论上，它应该已经同Palm Pilots个人掌上电脑一样退出历史舞台。但事实上，电邮通讯不但没有消亡，而且从来没有真正受到威胁。现在有这么多新的电邮通讯产品推出，恰恰表明这种十多年来行之有效的模式受到了广泛认可，而并不是什么出人意料之外的回潮。
Today’s email newsletters provide the same value propositions as they did at the outset: Direct opt-in delivery into an essential communication channel, without artificial layout or length restrictions determined by a third party. It is a responsive technology, where producers can enable interaction with consumers — minus the trolling risks of a website comment section. Content can be curation, long-form prose or anything in between. Email also can provide exclusivity to a much greater extent than can social media channels. Finally, email newsletter analytics are, in many cases, as good as you can get anywhere else on the web.
如今的电邮通讯在价值主张方面并没有改变初衷：读者直接选择加入，内容被发送到一个重要的沟通渠道，没有人为的版式设计，也不受第三方确定的长度限制。这是一种迅速积极反应的技术，生产者可与消费者进行互动——同时又避免了网站评论区被人故意发布煽动性信息的风险。它的内容可以是短新闻、长篇散文或介于两者之间的其它形式。与社交媒体渠道相比，电子邮件的排他性大得多。最后，在很多情况下，电邮通讯分析的质量不逊色于其它任何线上平台。
Moreover, when exactly is it that email itself is supposed to have died? Remember that Groupon, a $4.5 billion company, was founded in late 2008 using email as its exclusive media. Or two years ago, when Google announced that there were 425 million active Gmail accounts (or, put another way, more than 6% of the world population). Obviously not today, when email newsletters as “on the march” (as Carr writes).
此外，电子邮件本身何曾消亡？2008年末，如今市值45亿美元的团购网站Groupon创建之时，可是将电子邮件作为它唯一的媒介。而两年前，谷歌（Google）宣布它旗下的电子邮件服务Gmail有4.25亿（相当于全世界人口的6％以上）活跃账户。如今，电邮更不可能消亡，因为电邮通讯正在“发展壮大”（卡尔文中如是写道）呢。
Indeed, the death of email newsletters has been greatly exaggerated. In that there was no decline in the first place.
确实，电邮通讯已死的说法纯属夸张。因为电邮通讯根本就还没有走上下坡路。