Every Thursday at 10:15 AM, an email lands in nine hundred inboxes. It has a subject line that tries too hard — “This Week’s Wins! 🎉” or “The Buzz: What’s Happening Across Teams.” It contains a message from the CEO that was clearly written by someone who is not the CEO, a summary of a team-building event that twelve people attended, a reminder about the parking policy, and a photo of someone holding a certificate. Its open rate hovers around twelve percent, which the internal communications team reports as “strong engagement.” Nobody questions this number because nobody cares enough to question it. This is the internal newsletter. And it is the loneliest document in corporate America.

The Archaeology of Corporate Self-Talk

The internal newsletter exists at the intersection of two organizational anxieties: the fear that employees don’t know what’s happening, and the fear that if they did, they wouldn’t care. It’s a document designed to create the appearance of transparency without the inconvenience of actual transparency. The real news — the layoffs being planned, the product pivot being debated, the VP who’s about to “pursue other opportunities” — never appears in the newsletter. What appears instead is a carefully curated fiction of corporate harmony: people winning awards, teams hitting targets, and birthdays being celebrated.

Nobody reads the newsletter because nobody needs to. The information it contains is either already known (everyone knew about the office renovation because they’ve been hearing drills for three weeks), irrelevant (the sales team’s Q2 results mean nothing to the warehouse staff), or performative (a “spotlight” on an employee who was voluntold to participate). The newsletter answers questions nobody asked, in a format nobody requested, at a frequency nobody agreed to.

And yet it persists. Quarter after quarter, the communications team dutifully assembles another edition, soliciting content from department heads who treat the request like a homework assignment — completed grudgingly, submitted late, and written with the enthusiasm of a hostage reading a prepared statement. The result is a newsletter that reads like it was assembled by a committee of people who have never met each other, because functionally, that’s exactly what happened.

The Open Rate Illusion

Let’s talk about that twelve percent open rate. First, it’s inflated. Email preview panes trigger open tracking pixels, so a significant portion of those “opens” are people scrolling past the email on their way to something that actually matters. Second, “open” doesn’t mean “read.” Opening an email and reading an email are two fundamentally different activities, the same way picking up a book and reading a book are different. You can pick up Infinite Jest. That doesn’t make you a David Foster Wallace scholar.

The internal comms team knows this. Deep down, beneath the quarterly engagement report and the stakeholder satisfaction survey, they know the newsletter is a vanity project for the C-suite — a tangible artifact they can point to and say “look, we communicate.” It’s not communication. It’s broadcast. Communication implies a listener. The newsletter has senders and deleters, but precious few readers.

This is where the KPI Shark finds its natural habitat. The newsletter is the ultimate ego metric — a thing that gets measured not because the measurement matters, but because the act of measuring creates the illusion of value. Open rate, click-through rate, scroll depth — all carefully tracked, all utterly meaningless when the fundamental question remains: does anyone actually care about what we’re saying?

Why Companies Keep Publishing Newsletters Nobody Wants

The internal newsletter survives for the same reason most corporate traditions survive: inertia and fear. Stopping the newsletter feels like admitting that internal communication has failed. And nobody wants to be the person who killed the newsletter, because then every future communication gap — real or perceived — gets blamed on its absence. “We used to have a newsletter,” someone will say in a meeting eighteen months from now, as if that newsletter was the thing standing between organizational alignment and total chaos.

There’s also the sunk cost problem. Someone was hired to write the newsletter. There’s a template. There’s a distribution list. There’s a content calendar pinned to a wall somewhere. There’s an entire infrastructure built around producing a document that nobody asked for, and dismantling that infrastructure feels wasteful. So instead of killing the newsletter, organizations do something worse: they “refresh” it. New design. New name. Same content. Same open rate. Now featuring a Spotify playlist from the CEO.

The truth that nobody wants to confront is that most internal communication problems can’t be solved by newsletters. They’re solved by managers who actually talk to their teams. By leaders who share information directly, honestly, and in context. By Slack channels, town halls, and the radical act of walking over to someone’s desk and telling them what they need to know. The newsletter is a substitute for leadership communication, and substitutes rarely satisfy.

What Would Actually Work Instead

If you must have internal communications (and yes, at a certain scale, you must), consider this: respect the reader’s time. No one needs a weekly newsletter. Monthly is plenty. Quarterly might be better. Each edition should contain exactly three things: something the reader didn’t know, something the reader needs to do, and something that makes the reader feel connected to the organization’s purpose. That’s it. No parking reminders. No birthday lists. No CEO messages ghostwritten by an intern.

Make it scannable. If your newsletter requires more than ninety seconds to consume, it’s too long. The irony of internal communications is that the people who write them love words, and the people who receive them have no time for them. Write for the scanner, not the reader. Bold the action items. Link to the details. Get out of the way.

Most importantly, measure what matters. Stop celebrating open rates and start measuring whether the newsletter changes behavior. Did employees who read about the new benefits policy actually enroll? Did the team that was featured see an increase in cross-departmental collaboration? If the newsletter isn’t changing anything, it’s not communicating. It’s just making noise. And there’s already plenty of noise in the average employee’s inbox — 121 emails per day, according to the research, and your newsletter is competing with every single one.

Or, and hear me out, just stop. Stop the newsletter. See if anyone notices. If they don’t — and they probably won’t — you’ve just saved your communications team forty hours a month that could be spent on work that actually matters. Like, say, helping the CEO learn to communicate directly. Now that would be worth reading about. And worth wearing — grab the Spreadsheet Sloth to commemorate every hour you’ve spent formatting content nobody consumed.

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