My general suggestion would be to not reinvent the wheel too much. The general goal of the newsletter is to stay in touch with BRTD members that aren't playing or visiting the forums frequently and provide them a short overview on what they have been missing lately.
This means we can easily tab on content that's already out there in the forums and other sources and stick to providing links with short descriptions/summaries. As Pajszer said, for a first time we can go back a bit longer but after that it's mostly a 1 or 3 month cycle, depending on the newsletter frequency.
My suggestion for a format:
[ol]
[li]Game related news[/li]
[li]Community related news[/li]
[li]BRTD related news[/li]
[li]Various unrelated news[/li]
[/ol]
1. Game related news: This is stuff around PS2 itself.
[ol]
[li]Summary of most important changes from the last patches[/li]
[li]Nifty tips and guides from our forums and other sources (like an implant guide for instance)[/li]
[li]Developer/SOE related stuff[/li]
[li]Upcoming changes to the game (roadmap related stuff like Hossin/continent locking)[/li]
[/ol]
[ul]
[li]
Waterson-Mattherson merge upcoming (If you're not from Waterson, you don't water, son.): http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/27i39r/twitter_j_smedley_looking_good_for_a_waterson/[/li]
[li]Tank (turret stabilization!) and Liberator (big nerf) changes upcoming: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/upcoming-tank-and-liberator-changes.189062/[/li]
[li]New continent locking, Warpgate rotating and Alert rules! A locked continent triggers a Warpgate rotation and is now unplayable until another continent gets locked. During off-hours multiple continents can be locked and Alerts are only triggered by players now: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/june-continent-locking.189065/[/li]
[/ul]
2. Community related news: What's going on around the game.
[ol]
[li]Competitive scene and other community events (CC, PAL, Ps2Pickup/ServerSmash)[/li]
[li]Remarkable contributions from the community (PSU, reddit, Youtube, SOE forums): Like this
video for instance or the Recursion overlay ("double kill!").[/li]
[li]"Channel (Youtube/Twitch/podcast) of the month".[/li]
[li]Agenda, upcomming community stuff.[/li]
[/ol]
3. BRTD related news: Everything around our members and community
[ol]
[li]BRTD in the news, external BRTD coverage.[/li]
[li]Player profile, a 'member of the month" interview.[/li]
[li]From our members: Remarkable forum posts, Mumble quotes, "
BRTD moments", YouTubes and other contributions (like our awesome new landing page)[/li]
[li]BRTD events and agenda: AAR's, upcoming trainings and matches.[/li]
[li]Official announcements: New members, promotions, cert requirements, new Mumble version, new host, etc.[/li]
[/ol]
4. Various unrelated news: This is mainly stuff picked by our editors that doesn't fall into the categories above.
[ol]
[li]Editor column[/li]
[li]News about other games popular within BRTD, like Star Citizen or DayZ[/li]
[li]Funny news, pics and Youtubes[/li]
[li]Etc.[/li]
[/ol]
Btw I'm not suggesting that every newsletter necessarily needs to cover all these (sub-)categories, nor that we should stick to only these ones. It's just a rough guidance for stuff we can think off to put in.
It might be a handy idea to create a newsletter sticky topic in the public forum, where everybody can dump their content links in for editors to choose from. We also need to think about tools that let us easily create newsletters like www.paper.li
