Many people have asked about how the List started: In 1997, after a 20+ year stint in the publishing industry where I'd been the chief editor of a number of publications, including Byte and Windows Magazine, I wanted to get back to my first professional love, which was writing. I moved my family out of New York and back to our native New England, and hung out my shingle as a freelance writer. (See http://www.langa.com/about_fred.htm if you're a masochist and want all the gory details. <g>)
At the time, I had a hazy idea involving a self-publication effort that would let me communicate directly with readers, rather than being totally dependent on traditional publishing processes. Maybe--- an email newsletter?
There was a second element to this hazy idea. I know it sounds corny, but I'd been in publishing for a long time and had made a good living at it. This fuzzy piece of the puzzle was the idea of somehow "giving back" to the readers and to the computing community in some way.
So, I wanted the newsletter to be free; I'd pay to run it myself, out-of-pocket, assuming I could make a living as a freelance. That led to a third piece of the puzzle: I needed a way to self-publicize my for-pay work so people would know about it and read it, and keep my publishers happy so I could indeed make a living.
There was no "Eureka" moment--- I didn't run naked through the streets of my home town---but eventually the ideas firmed up enough so that I figured I'd send a weekly email message to interested readers. The emails would contain useful tips, tricks, and other information about using computer hardware and software, and also would contain pointers to the columns and web sites I was producing for others--- the ones that paid the bills! <g>
But I didn't want the emails to be just a tease: I wanted them to contain enough "meat" to be useful and worth reading in their own right. And I wanted them to be rich with pointers to many sources of information, only some of which would be my own work.
I also wanted the emails to have a personal tone, more like a letter from a friend than some kind of corporate-speak publication, or a generic-voiced magazine article. The weekly email letter was going to be from me, personally, and written in the first person.
In short, I wanted it to be a simple, friendly and (hopefully) helpful email from me to interested readers.
Fast-forward two years: By then, the list had grown to a size where I could no longer afford to publish it out-of-pocket--- it was costing literally thousands of dollars a month! So, after much internal debate, I began accepting advertising as a way to defray my escalating publishing costs and to keep from losing my shirt on the deal. With readers making purchases from the sponsored links, the newsletter became more or less self-sustaining--- until the dot-com crash. <g> Then, web advertising tanked, and things looked grim again. I somehow had to change the newsletter fundamentally, or stop publishing it.
That was the impetus for the Plus! edition--- a version of the newsletter that would not depend on the vagaries of external advertisers. Instead, along the lines of Public Broadcasting, interested readers would pay a very small fee (literally a few cents per issue) to get a version of the newsletter that would have no ads, and would carry extra content in place of the ads. Readers would get more content, and I wouldn't have to worry on an issue-to-issue basis about keeping the newsletter afloat financially: A win-win. (more Plus! info)
Now, eight years into the project, you're seeing the results. <g> The total operation now includes five active web sites and five separate versions of the newsletter And it's still a one-person operation!
There's lots more ahead: Stay tuned, and thanks for being a part of the LangaList community. I hope you're enjoying the newsletter as much as I enjoy bringing it to you!
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