This is purely a personal perception which I have not had chance to investigate too much but it’s a view that may resonate with others.
I work for an organisation that has not yet embraced blogs internally, but does do quite a lot with newsletters. I rarely read these newsletters, and I know that others are similar. I take in far more information through blogs that I ever do through newsletters. So why is that?
Some of it, I am sure, is related to to a lack of concentration of my behalf. I have become the ultimate skim reader. If the title or the context don’t make we want to read – I won’t. Skim reading newsletters is not easy. They are normally created in a form that assumes that they will be printed off, this doesn’t facilitate skim reading. I tend to skim read because most of the time I don’t need to know a piece of information, it’s more important for me to know it exists and that I can get hold of it quickly. That’s where blogs have a huge advantage. In my reader I can see that thousands of bits of information exist, when I need them I can go and get them. I know that the information exists because I have skim read through. If something new and pertinent comes up I’ll read it there and then but normally I’m in skimming mode. Why should I waste my time reading something in detail?
Another reason is similar to this one, but subtly different. An individual blogs tend to deal (if they are done right) with a single subject. Newsletters tend to deal with a multitude of things. Finding the quality in all of the words is very difficult (and boring).
The final reason (for me) is that there is a sense of control with blogs which corporate newsletters don’t have. I have configured my reader to go and get information from this particular source, I am in control. Compare that to my normal attitude to newsletters – “oh no, what have communications set me now”. The ownership is completely different. Yes I know these communications people are trying to do me a favour, but it doesn’t feel like it.
So give me a feed any day, don’t bother sending me a newsletter, and definitely don’t give me another repository to look in.
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Graham Chastney 
I agree with your comments, especially as a decent feed reader will allow you to construct your own virtual newsletter from all of the many company newsletters that get sent out. I only have one rider to this. In order to properly use your approach, you are reliant on the creator of your feed to produce an abstract that can be skim read and which actually gives an idea of what is in the full article. I have seen both the approach that just puts in the first line of the article and the other extreme that puts in the whole text. Neither of which is satisfactory. The end result of which is that the art of the precis must be resurrected for your approach to work. (Bring back O level use of English).
Who said that the use of the internet would reduce literacy.
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Thanks Stuart. I kind of agree with you, but…I make the whole of my text available in the feed, but try to indicate in the first few lines where I am going. This means that the text is there if people want it, but the precis is also there (of a sort).
By the way; it took me three attempts to get my ‘O’ level English so I’m not going to lecture anyone on that subject.
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