With an email, there is a presumption of connection, of something personal, that makes it a good platform for publishers. Newer email newsletter outfits like TinyLetter, which MailChimp owns, are simple, free and easy to use. TinyLetter has over 100,000 users who reach 9.3 million subscribers, and it has had an increase of 15 percent in the number of newsletters sent in the last year.

Those who have found themselves sucked into the latest craze might notice that many of the incoming messages have one thing (besides for the email thing) in common. The letters always end with the same three words: "Delivered by TinyLetter."

No one’s saying that the future of news is a bunch of email newsletters, but their recent success is a trend that’s worth investigating—one that combines the power of personal brand journalism with the allure of providing a filter for the endless content stream.

With the death of Google Reader—a service that let you read multiple sites in one place—lots of people simply moved on from that tech to newsletters, replacing mass delivery with a more focused one. Additionally, the service TinyLetter came along and has made reduced the barriers to creating and receiving newsletters.

I’ve been writing into the stream for seven years, and I haven’t had this much fun in a long time. My newsletter is finite (always less than 600 words) and it comes once a day. It has edges. You can finish it.