From the always informative Marketing Profs, here’s a short article on three reasons you shouldn’t abandon your email newsletter for a blog, or (I suppose) vice versa:
My advice for now is to continue publishing an e-newsletter. If you’re sending it in HTML, trim your design down to the bare minimum and make the file size as small as possible. This will give you a better chance of getting past the spam filters and other blocking tools being used by major ISPs, such as AOL.
Though we’re big blog advocates, blogs are just another tool in your marketing arsenal. The open rate on email newsletters is falling (it’s around 39%), but they’re still an important mechanism for communicating with your customer base.
A small note on Marketing Profs’ feedback mechanism. They claim to “value my feedback”, but unfortunately all I can do is rate the article from 1 to 5 (or ‘terrible’ to ‘excellent’). That’s not feedback–it’s just cruel to the person who wrote the article. Why not open up comments like The Tyee does, and see how it works? Cross-posted to my day-job blog.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I have seen this post on a few blogs, but I guess the question that I would want answered is, “what strategy to start with”? If you do not have an e-newsletter, is it better to start one or to just dive right in with a blog? My blog is new, but I think it will be much more affective than an e-newsletter.
What do these marketers send to people who don’t allow HTML mail? My mail program strips out all HTML and either translates it to plain text (which can turn into an amusing/annoying mishmash of crap, depending…) or it discards the HTML altogether and just gives me a blank e-mail.
I wish people would quit with the HTML mail, really.
I guess that goes back to my point. I also hate those HTML e-mail, and as a matter of fact Outlook 2003 turns of the graphics by default, even if you accept HTML messages. I say just use a BLOG.
Robert: Trust me, most of the world still receives most of its information via email. As such, you don’t want to ignore the less-tech savvy majority. I’d just do both. A blog feeds conveniently into a monthly or bi-monthly newsletter. When we send out our newsletter, we always check our blog to see if there are any items we’d like to reprint.
Carol: Many newsletter applications enable you to send both (or perhaps either) an HTML or text newsletter. I’ve never understood how this functionality worked, but apparently it’s mostly for AOL folks.
Darren,
So are you saying that you use your blog to help craft the information that you will put into your E-Newsletter. That is a great idea! Do you also send out a print version of this newsletter? For me, it comes down to the factors of cost and effectiveness