There’s an interesting post today on the Nieman Journalism Lab site by Adrienne LaFrance. It’s a bit of a throwback, if you excuse the pun (she focuses on a new digital baseball newsletter called The Slurve). She’s here to say that newsletters can be to the 2010s what blogs were to the 2000s.

Rather than creating an intensely focused blog, LaFrance wants publishers to deliver more quality, personalized information directly to a subscriber’s inbox. “Why settle for hyper-targeted coverage that caters to millennials nostalgic for Dawson’s Creek who may or may not see your work, for example, when you can deliver content to an audience of individuals who feel like you’re writing directly to them, right in their inbox?”—or in baseball terminology, their wheelhouse.

To be fair, this is more than just Everything Old Is New Again. The examples that LaFrance cites of quality “newsletters” are not called that by their creators. She points to Nieman which calls theirs Daily Email Updates; Ann Friedman who publishes the Ann Friedman Weekly. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop is a “weekly publication.” The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake simply calls his Aaron Blake’s Mailing List. Regardless of what we call them, they engage and involve, target specific audiences and are sent to subscriber inboxes.

This is also what The Slurve does. Started by Michael Brendan Dougherty, formerly of the American Conservative and the Business Insider, it delivers baseball each morning to several hundred subscribers. It tries to distinguish itself by taking the time to be both original and a window to other excellent, original content. He charges $4 a month or $36 a year, “a rate that felt affordable enough to draw subscribers, but high enough to keep people interested each day,” he said. And it’s working.

“I find a newsletter personal—more personal than a blog,” Dougherty says. “It is addressed to you.”

Some elements Dougherty is capitalizing on:

* A hard paywall. Non-subscribers can only see a couple sample issues but nothing from today, no scores, no comments, no highlights. You have to pay to play.

* “Daily” is an engaging word. It scored an impressive 27% positive variance on open rates in a recent subject line survey—and even more in click-thrus.

* Differentiation is good. His daily stands out—people know what they’re getting each day.

* Social media. His Twitter following continues to grow—more than 2,200 followers including some big hitters with much larger followings

On the site Contently, Evan Randall wrote, “By creating original content and curating everyone else’s work into one place, Dougherty is part of a change in how we think about content. Alan Jacobs of The American Conservative asks for a ‘Slurve’-type newsletter for every topic—such as one that covers soccer, or the world of academia—and even suggests that this could have been the answer all along: ‘It may well be that we came closer to getting the problem of digital news delivery right fifteen years ago.’”

“A generalist fan may love just one thing a day,” Dougherty said. “I make sure The Slurve always finds that one thing.” After an original opening, he gives links to stories and highlights that he has found after hours of research. He does his part for gamification with a Trivia quiz, and then even gives us box scores, one of the last reasons true sports fans will give for subscribing to the print paper.

People “don’t have the time or inclination to sift through lots of junky or parochial content on the Internet to find the best writing,” Dougherty said.

Has Dougherty reinvented the wheel? Hardly. But he seems to be taking what’s best from the new and old schools—call it Moneyball meets the smell of shoe leather. Let’s face it—time is not on our side any more. There’s just not enough of it. The more you can do to create a one-stop shopping place for your niche subject, the better. Now play ball.

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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline