You can LISTEN to my newsletter! Go to https://go.ttot.link/MakingANewsletter and you’ll be able to listen to it. Let me know if you like this feature or not and whether I should continue it. No, that’s not me reading it.

A few have asked how I produce a new article or newsletter. Well, first you have to know that I produce not only a newsletter but also a column for my old hometown newspapers. There is a slight difference between the two and I’ll call out the differences as we encounter them.

First comes the idea. I often get ideas from you, from the various meetings I attend or run. There will be a recurring theme or some questions or interests in certain technologies or areas. Occasionally, I’ll get an email with a suggestion for a topic, and other times an idea just comes to me. I’ll pass the subject by a few friends to get their perspective and, if I get general agreement, I get started.

I use https://beehiiv.com to compose. It has a decent editor with enough embellishments like headers, bold, italic, links and such that I can build it pretty much how I want. When I think I’ve finished the article, I’ll give it to ChatGPT or one of the other AIs to check spelling and grammar — I have the AI suggest changes but not make them. I feel it’s important that these all use my voice and style. So, I’ll accept some grammar and spelling suggestions but I will never compromise my voice or adopt wholesale changes to the original.

Once I’m happy with the spelling and such, since the AI already knows the entire content of my article, I’ll ask that same AI to come up with a small image that reflects the content. Believe it or not, the first image the AI comes up with is usually what I use.

Once I have the image, I turn to Canva, a graphic design app. Canva has the template I use for the image that ultimately makes it into the completed article. You’ve seen it — the only things that change are the title and subtitle, and the AI-created image for the article’s contents. Canva makes it easy to change the wording as well as making it really easy to replace the image from the previous article with the one for the new article.

Once I’ve got pretty much everything locked in, I take the body of the article to ElevenLabs, a text-to-speech service, and, with a little editing, I have it generate a spoken version of the article. The published newsletter gets the spoken version, the newspaper version doesn’t (although that may change with this article — we’ll see). I download the audio, put it in my Google Drive and create a short link to it using my personal link shortener which produces a go.ttot.link URL. That short link makes it into the newsletter for those who prefer to listen to the article as opposed to reading it.

The last paragraph of the article differs between the newsletter and the newspaper. It’s not a big difference, but it’s a difference, nonetheless, as it addresses the different audiences.

Once all that is done, I use the facilities provided by Beehiiv to schedule the newsletter to be published, generally on Tuesday at 2 PM Pacific time, at which time it is emailed to those who have subscribed to the newsletter and it's made available on the newsletter's website. On Wednesday I send the article to my contacts at the newspaper for future publication — it generally appears in the printed newspaper and online within a few days. Once it’s published, I update the short link to the newspaper column to point to the new column. And, with that, I’m finished with that newsletter and column.

I hope this gives you some insight into what I do to create a new newsletter/article. Don't hesitate to write to me if you have questions!

As always, I aim to help you understand the basics and equip you to search for more detailed information.

Please feel free to email me at [email protected] with questions, comments, suggestions, requests for future columns, newsletter signups, or whatever. Or just drop me a quick note and say HI!

And remember that I maintain a NotebookLM notebook of all my previous newsletters at https://go.ttot.link/TonysNotebook. Since it has access to all of my newsletters, you can ask it questions like “what are passkeys” or “what can I do to help me remember things.” You’ll need a Google account to access it and, when you visit, you’ll be given your own NotebookLM notebook.

If you like, you can read my most recent newsletter in the Hillsboro Times Gazette at https://go.ttot.link/TG-Column - I should have that link updated shortly after this edition of the newsletter appears in the online version of the newspaper.