Trouble for email newsletters

A little more than a month ago I wrote a piece saying I feared for the future of the email newsletter.
Now comes more bad news for publishers of those electronic products. AOL and Yahoo will begin charging a small fee to bulk emailers. Folks who pay will get preferential treatment. Folks that don't, won't.
Now let me be clear. I'm not suggesting that it's time for B2B publishers to abandon email newsletters. There is too much revenue attached to these things to walk away just yet. And I don't want to suggest that the AOL/Yahoo move is some sort of unmitigated horror (it's too early to tell.) But it should be clear by now to everyone that email newsletters are doomed. RSS is a vastly superior delivery system. And although it may take some time before your readers are ready to make the switch, you can be sure that they will make the switch.
So what am I suggesting?
Two things:
1) Make the only decision that you'll need to make about RSS -- full or partial feed -- and then offer RSS for all your content.
2) If any money in your budget is earmarked for doing anything with email newsletters, change your budget. Take the cash and use it for something else.

tags: journalism, b2b, media, trade press, magazines, advertising, newsletters