Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
January/February 2003

Emerging Technologies:
A Plan for Creating Internal Newsletters

by Don Huntington
EBSTC Member

Last quarter’s article covered the changing face of the technical writer’s role. This article will discuss internal newsletters as a tool for implementing communication in a company or division of a company at any level. It will provide some hints to becoming part of a solution for getting the word out in any kind of organization.

The Power of Internal Newsletters

Abbie Hoffman made his famous comment that freedom of the press only applied to those who could afford a printing press because he lived and wrote before the coming of the Internet. Companies, non-profit organizations, and even individuals can now publish as much information they wish over the Internet or on company intranets. Best of all, from their point of view, such publishing entails virtually no expense beyond meeting the salaries of whatever writers, web designers, and artists participate in providing content for the newsletter and creating the pages.

We all work in industries that are searching for ways of increasing productivity at the same time that they are reducing resources. Clear communication, of course, provides a key to the efficient operation of any industry. Internal, online newsletters can provide an effective channel of communication that we can now create, format, and deliver with little or no production expense.

Last year, for example, the newsletter you are reading, the Devil Mountain Views, moved to an online format. In one issue we reduced our production costs for the newsletter from hundreds of dollars essentially to zero. We also replaced a complicated delivery and distribution system that required several weeks with the pressing of a button.

Simplifying Newsletter Creation

Experienced technical writers can leverage the universal need to expand capabilities with diminishing resources even further in the area of online, internal newsletters as we develop our faculties in order to carry out the functions of writer, web designer, and artist.

Any senior technical writer who has acquired skills in HTML editing, graphics editing, and use of a digital camera can, when required to do so, create an online newsletter as an essentially one-person activity. Tasks associated with producing an online newsletter include:

• Design layout and format
• Create the departments and article titles
• Interview writers for all content
• Ghostwrite the articles
• Write original articles
• Lay out all pages
• Generate HTML code
• Take all pictures for the newsletter
• Manage and in some cases create all the graphics
• Maintain the Web sites
• Write the ezines announcing the issues

Hassle-free Newsletters

I’m a person of no remarkable native abilities, but I have learned effective tools and techniques for undertaking all of these activities. I’ve created and am creating newsletters for a half-dozen clients in which I conduct all of these activities myself.

I tell my clients that I create “hassle-free” newsletters—requiring nothing from them except allowing me access to the sources of the articles for brief sessions out of which will come the pictures and the raw content for the articles that I then ghostwrite on the interviewee’s behalf.

My clients have all loved the results. It is a great business to be in!

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