Also, a lot of rss feeds now only offer the title of the post/article. I still need to visit the pages anyway to get to the content. With a newsletter, i receive a bit of context around the content as well.
Non-technical users can simply subscribe to the newsletter with their email address. If they don't understand what this project is about, they probably don't need and don't want it.
Users that prefer RSS over email use kill-the-newsletter for outlets that don't offer RSS.
And from what i've read, even the technical users prefer it most of the time.