How Lena Dunham's 'Lenny Letter' is leading the way for a new generation of e-newsletters

Smart, funny and provocative group emails are winging their way into our inboxes, says Susannah Butter
Big senders: Lena Dunham, right, and Girls producer Jenni Konner have set up email newsletter Lenny
Autumn de Wilde

One of this week’s most read articles is by the actress Jennifer Lawrence. She writes openly and with humour about sexism in Hollywood and wanting to be liked. This piece wasn’t in a magazine or newspaper, or even on a website. The only way to read it was by signing up to a newsletter.

Lawrence is the latest contributor to Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter, which lands in inboxes (including mine) every week. Also gladdening my stack of emails are messages from a sex worker, a cartoonist at The New Yorker, novelist Miranda July and the woman who formerly ran Barack Obama’s social media. With all these letters there is no need to scour the internet for reading matter or download it to read on the Tube home when in a wi-fi or 3G-free zone.

Dunham is part of a wave of ladies sending group letters, with names such as Madame Ovary and Prostitute Laundry. Men are in on it too but women rule this new form of communication.

Jessica Grose, Lenny ’s editor, explains the appeal of the format of the future: “It’s almost a throwback to reading magazines. The email newsletter format is so much cleaner than a website.” Increasingly, people are rejecting email in favour of messenger services as a medium to chat with friends and colleagues, so it makes sense for email to be repurposed too.

You’ve got mail: writer Ann Friedman uses Tiny Letter to share weekly links
Jason Travis

It is part of the slow internet movement — being able to read thousands of words without the distraction of opening another tab. Dunham says Lenny is a way “to remember that the internet has the power to take you into quiet places — something we don’t usually use it for”. Recent Lenny letters have been long, featuring a mix of reading material from interviews with Hillary Clinton (plus her taking a selfie) to recipes and horoscopes. The only way to read all this is to sign up.

Dunham has spoken about newsletters being “a safe space”. She has said she wanted “a snark-free place for feminists to get information: on how to vote, eat, dress, fuck and live better”.


There isn’t much money in it yet — Lenny is self-funded but Dunham plans to work with carefully selected advertisers and e-commerce options.

For journalist Ann Friedman it was more about the calm of being away from reading in a browser window. She uses Tiny Letter to send a weekly bulletin of media she has produced and consumed and says: “Different newsletters are popular for different reasons. I’m not sure newsletters have a particular appeal to women as creators or subscribers.

“I know safety was not part of my personal calculus in starting one. But Charlotte Shane, who writes Prostitute Laundry about being a sex worker, is pretty open about the fact that she started her newsletter because blogging made her feel too exposed. Some are confessional. Some are curatorial. Some are editorial. I think curated ones like mine are popular due to a sense of social media overwhelm, and because they’re a nice way to catch up if you’ve been off the internet for a few days.”

Lenny’s first email featured an interview with Hillary Clinton
Joe Raedle/Getty Images

She says the newsletter helps her “step away from the fray and think about what really affected me this week. I like promoting good work I’ve read, or projects my friends are invested in.” She writes and sends it on Friday mornings to “bring closure to my week”.

It’s an easy way to catch up. Next Draft, Today in Tabs and This Week on the Internet all put people back in the loop. There are also designated ones for podcasts, such as The Audit and Hot Pod.

Others are more playful. Hello Prompt invites subscribers to send in their own writing and tell a communal story, or respond to the work of others, while Pep Talk sends a weekly GIF.

Traditional media has caught on to newsletters. Women in London have Emerald Street and the FT has upped its investment in them. Head of curated content there Andrew Jack says: “Email is almost halfway between print and online. Newsletters are a powerful and popular way to help guide readers through the information overload to the stories that matter, and deliver them in an easy way that they like. They are personal, targeted, conversational, concise, easy to access and retrieve, and convenient — including the option to read even when there is no wi-fi or phone connection.”

For Jack, “what works is concise commentary — joining the dots between stories, making connections and re-injecting the serendipity of the newspaper page. Lena Dunham is right that they can allow for a more targeted, intimate and safer, controlled way to communicate with readers, including when there is a risk of harassment and trolling.

“But we are actively trying to encourage a conversation with readers even in our newsletters: through encouraging them to email us back, reply to regular questionnaires, provide feedback on their interests and — most recently — to answer a weekly news quiz.”

FT journalist Robin Wigglesworth, who also sends his own personal newsletter, says: “Newsletters allow you to write like an actual human rather than in a strict house style. It also helps that they land in your inbox, so you don’t have to remember to check a website or a blog.

As the cliché goes, no one can finish the internet — though it seems many people are trying — and there are tons of interesting stories out there that friends, family, colleagues and rivals stumble over that I never spot. A newsletter is basically like an organised way of sending a link to a friend and saying ‘Hey, check out this’.”

And now, with so many newsletters, there is no shortage of friends to message you.

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