Member of the GOP tech community are buzzing about this e-mail from the RNC last night:

And not in a good way. This is a stock weekly newsletter with a series of “in case you missed it” links to week-old news articles. It’s the kind of product that communications people are always trying to get the new media shop to send, but which is strikingly out of date in a time when Twitter has cut the news cycle down to seconds and when people expect their online communications to be interesting and relevant.

The newsletter has been a staple of nonprofit communications for decades. Its purpose originally was a good one — aggregate news about an obscure topic and deliver it to interested subscribers on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. When information was hard to find, particularly about issues that weren’t A1 news, the newsletter served a valuable purpose.

In an always-on news environment, the newsletter-style format seems quaint, particularly when applied online.

Don’t get me wrong — periodical e-mail products can be valuable. I subscribe to several daily e-mail alerts every morning that help me prioritize the news of the day. But these largely come from news outlets whose job it is to churn out exactly this sort of breaking news content. The job of the RNC is not to be a news bureau, but to build a community and activate its base around shared principles. Every e-mail sent to that user base should have an interactive or conversational component, consistent with the Internet’s defining purpose as a two-way medium. The newsletter is inherently top-down — dictating which stories are interesting — and not in the aggressive way we’ve come to expect from modern communications shops, but in a passive and stale kind of way that highlights week-old news.

During the primaries, every Republican candidate adopted the weekly newsletter format largely because McCain did it first. Instead of looking to the real innovation coming from the Obama campaign, traditional Republican operatives fell into a sort of groupthink on matters small and large that was a symptom of how we lost our way in the campaign ground war.

Almost always, these newsletter were a waste of bandwidth. First, they almost always started off with the same subject line — either in whole or in its preface. This meant that after the novelty of the product had worn off, open rates steadily declined as all but the most dedicated readers dismissed the e-mail as old news. Good subject lines tease the reader and “Weekly Update” kind of falls short of that goal. Second, they were usually sent at 5pm on a Friday — the worst possible time to send an e-mail. We can sympathize with the idea that Friday is usually a good time to clear the decks, but it’s the worst possible time for users who are already checked out for the weekend. You wouldn’t send your main communications product out to reporters at 5pm on a Friday, would you? (Thankfully, the RNC product doesn’t make this mistake.) Third, the weekly update is out of place in a rapid-fire campaign environment that’s supposed to be exciting and inspiring for the people on your list. The subliminal message of a “Weekly Update” is that of a constant level of activity, and that big news is only worth sharing once a week (except for fundraising letters). This is utterly inconsistent with the ethos of most of the good campaigns I’ve been on, which have lots of peaks and valleys and if something big happens, people need to know now, not a week from now. And point 3a would be that every set-piece weekly e-mail is one less fundraising appeal, one less grassroots e-mail, and one less marketing email that earns media or otherwise moves the ball forward.

The weekly update format can also be a response to the internal politics of communications guys demanding an “ICYMI” be sent to the entire list every time some Democrat sneezes. The argument goes that it reduces the amount of e-mail that would otherwise get sent.

In an imperfect world where new media was subservient to communications, this may have been an appropriate response. But in a world where the Internet was decisive in electing a President, the new media department should have enough pull to both demand and implement a holistic strategy towards online communications where the campaign or committee only communicates to its whole base when it has something important to say, thus maximizing user engagement and response. Good e-mail should not randomly share links, but tell a story. It’s telling that this e-mail was only sent after the RNC lost its eCampaign Director, Cyrus Krohn. The people who are left in the RNC’s e-shop are smart and capable, but it’s possible that only someone with Cyrus’s stature could have pushed back

Also: the branding. Can’t we do better than “The Weekly Trunk?” It’s this type of insular, too-clever-by-half branding that’s just asking for a Colbert or Stewart hit — remember that awful GOP Convention logo? Unlike Democrats, we need not be embarrassed by our party’s mascot, but we often take things too far with the cutesy elephant stuff. I have high hopes that the new administration will junk the antiquated RNC seal as a sign that change has come, but that’s a post for another time.

First, we need to stop “The Weekly Trunk.”