- Jan 2024
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peculiargenres.commons.msu.edu peculiargenres.commons.msu.edu
- Nov 2023
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helenbeetham.substack.com helenbeetham.substack.com
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https://helenbeetham.substack.com/
Helen Beetham's work and newsletter are recommended by Doug Belshaw. If I heard correctly, she'll shortly appear on Season 8 of the Tao of Wao podcast: https://soundcloud.com/tao-of-wao/sets/season-8
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- Apr 2023
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on.substack.com on.substack.com
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Introducing Substack Notes<br /> by Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi
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In Notes, writers will be able to post short-form content and share ideas with each other and their readers. Like our Recommendations feature, Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack. But while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links.
Substack slowly adding features and functionality to make them a full stack blogging/social platform... first long form, then short note features...
Also pushing in on Twitter's lunch as Twitter is having issues.
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- May 2022
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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And it’s easy to leave. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, Substack writers can simply take their email lists and direct connections to their readers with them.
Owning your audience is key here.
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- Mar 2022
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www.roxinekee.com www.roxinekee.com
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For me, my newsletter blurbs spark essay ideas and turn into longer pieces. For example, writing about Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton turned into an inquiry on polymaths that I featured on the 39th and 40th editions of my newsletter. Eventually, these three editions turned into my essay on polymaths.
Newsletter pieces can be recombined into longer pieces later.
Flow: Twitter/conversations > newsletter > essay.
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every.to every.to
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A manifesto about what the Every platform is all about. They're trying to create a new(?) economic model for writers working together.
I'm not really sure how this is dramatically different from prior efforts or if the economic incentives are actually properly aligned here. Many writers without critically looking at the whole may be led here as much by marketing hype as anything else. It almost sounds like they're recreating The Huffington Post, but giving away some of the value up front instead of leaving all the value in one person's hand for a future sale.
Who owns the copyright of the created works? Are editors and proofreaders just work for hire here? What about their interests?
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If we decide to part ways, Leads can leave with a copy of their email list.
While a writer may leave a collective with their email list, do they necessarily benefit from having helped to get a going concern off the ground in the first place? Where does that slice of value sit? Do they also collect a multiple of the present value of the concern the way one might in buying a pre-existing business from another?
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- Feb 2022
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hardhistoriesjhu.substack.com hardhistoriesjhu.substack.com
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https://hardhistoriesjhu.substack.com/
Taking a moment to send a warm thank you to all the work (both visible and invisible) that Dr. Martha S. Jones and her lab are doing for the Johns Hopkins Community and far beyond. Where ever you live, I heartily recommend their newsletter Hard Histories at Hopkins.
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collect.readwriterespond.com collect.readwriterespond.com
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I would consider my Read Write Respond site as a ‘blog’, but agree with you that my Collect site is not really a blog. In some respects I would be happy enough to make it private is it is primarily my own secret garden with the gate left open. This is why I curate my monthly newsletter. It is a habit which I find forces me to look back through all the noise. I think this creates a clearer narrative to pick through than my multitude of links.
Aaron Davis uses the review through his website's posts, bookmarks, etc. to create his newsletter as a means of reviewing what he's read and thought about.
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every.to every.to
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Our business wouldn’t exist without Substack, and we think the world of them, but we’re excited to announce that Every will be run on a platform we built ourselves.
Every is an example of a newsletter built on Substack that realized what a massive cut was being taken out of the middle so they created their own platform instead.
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every.to every.to
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defector.com defector.com
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From "former staffers of Deadspin".
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Founded in partnership with a team of entrepreneurial journalists who believe in a better model to create excellent content while narrowing the synapse between elite creators and their audiences.
http://puck.news/who-is-puck/
Another platform play of journalists banding together to find a niche space of readers.
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puck.news puck.news
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https://puck.news/
Along with the proliferation of newsletters and paid journalism spaces, is this another in the litany of sites that do news analysis while chasing eyeballs? Is it following in the tradition of the move from hard news (or tiny amounts of it) to loud news analysis a la Fox News?
Will we see the volume and partisanship increase in this newsletter/paywall space over the next decade until the next thing arrives?
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therebooting.substack.com therebooting.substack.com
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Newsletters are an imperfect antidote to that, allowing writers a closer relationship with a more focused audience.
The ultimate value of newsletters is their more direct connection to a specific niche audience for which they curate news or content. The value they provide readers is as a filter of their area with some some useful analysis and perspective.
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Substack has now sold 1 million subscriptions to mostly individual publishers.
Today, we can announce that there are more than 1 million paid subscriptions to publications on Substack. On Substack, the newsletter from Substack https://on.substack.com/p/one-million-strong on 2021-11-15
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www.yammer.com www.yammer.com
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Nonfiction Techniques Spring 2022
Caveat emptor. A lot of these "influencer" methods are leaving 30% or far more of their value with the platforms they're using for distribution. A better path is to build and promote your own platform and have a direct relationship with one's readers (in newsletter spaces, it's about "owning"/having your reader's email address). Some other newsletter options can be found here: https://indieweb.org/newsletter as well as methods for building and owning your own technology stack across its site. If nothing else, consider having a website where you can have a portfolio/archive of your work.
Careful watchers of the newsletter space will notice that almost all of the highlight examples on these services are established big names with pre-existing platforms and audience. Where are the stories of the other 99.9% and how well they're doing? Who is actually making a full time living doing this without a significant leg up to start? As examples, look for major writers leaving the New York Times to set up newsletters, or people like Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg leaving The National Review to set up The Dispatch (as a newsletter platform)—it's a good bet that they're getting a better deal from Substack than the average person. The NiemanLab has some relatively good coverage of some of this space. (Their annual predictions series also has solid forward looking coverage of the journalism/technology space: https://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2022/.)
(Apologies for lurking... 😅, but happy to chat technology/publishing with anyone interested.)
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- Jan 2022
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eleanorkonik.com eleanorkonik.com
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So ultimately, I wound up not doing a lot with my stories… until I stumbled across a newsletter article on substack talking about how people were serializing their novels on newsletters, because the new newsletter-subscription models let them sell directly to fans without using Amazon or Wattpad or Patreon as a middleman.
People have begun serializing their novels using newsletters. This allows them to sell directly to fans without allowing middleman companies like Amazon, Patreon, or Wattpad to disintermediate them.
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- Nov 2021
- Oct 2021
- Aug 2021
- Jul 2021
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www.thecut.com www.thecut.com
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The financial promise of email newsletters
the financial side is certainly subtext, but this piece doesn't play into the underlying structure of this story. Makes this a bit of clickbait within the title.
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What motivated my newsletter reading habits normally? In large part, affection and light voyeurism. I subscribed to the newsletters of people I knew, who treated the form the way they had once treated personal blogs. I skimmed the dadlike suggestions of Sam Sifton in the New York Times’ Cooking newsletter (skillet chicken and Lana Del Rey’s “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” — sure, okay). I subscribed briefly to Alison Roman’s recipe newsletter before deciding that the ratio of Alison Roman to recipes was much too high. On a colleague’s recommendation, I subscribed to Emily Atkin’s climate newsletter and soon felt guilty because it was so long and came so often that I let it pile up unread. But in order to write about newsletters, I binged. I went about subscribing in a way no sentient reader was likely to do — omnivorously, promiscuously, heedless of redundancy, completely open to hate-reading. I had not expected to like everything I received. Still, as the flood continued, I experienced a response I did not expect. I was bored.
The question of motivation about newsletter subscriptions is an important one. Some of the thoughts here mirror some of my feelings about social media in general.
Why?
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“Substack is longform media Twitter, for good and for ill,” wrote Ashley Feinberg in the first installment of her Substack.
Definitely a hot take, but a truthful sounding one.
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How can writers bridge the gap between what they want to say and what someone else understands? Eleven months later, a line from Anne Helen Petersen’s announcement of her Substack newsletter haunts me still: Writing a newsletter, Petersen wrote, meant she could publish “pieces that take ten paragraphs to get to the nut graf, if there’s one at all.”
There's something in this quote that sounds more like old school blogging to me. Putting ideas out there and allowing the community to react and respond as a means of honing an idea can be useful and powerful. However, are writers actually doing this meaningfully over time? Are they objectively doing this and providing thoughtful updates over time?
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The baroque goofiness of Blackbird Spyplane’s house style can be something of a test for readers of the newsletter (the “sletter,” in Blackbird Spyplane parlance). “X out of ten people are going to show up and read that and just be like, This is impenetrable, I’m out,” Weiner told one interviewer. “But for the people who stick around, I think that it adds to a sense of, Oh, this is like an in-joke that I’m in on.” And better (at least to this reader) that clubbiness take a niche form — it is less claustrophobia-inducing than the many newsletters that seem to insist we are all wearily following the same disputes on Twitter, all inevitably watching the same shows on Netflix. Such newsletters wind up feeling like crowded rooms with too few windows on the world beyond.
This is a great description which is roughly how I feel about the awesome uniqueness that is https://www.kickscondor.com/.
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Earlier this year, a group of writers with popular tech and culture newsletters expanded upon this premise; they joined together to launch a Discord server called Sidechannel where all their subscribers could meet and chat. (“So it’s just people paying for internet friends?” asked one woman I know when this arrangement was described to her. Yes, and currently Sidechannel has some 5,000 members, several hundred of whom may be active at a given time.)
There's something a bit depressing about the idea of paying for online friends. Though creating, managing, and tummeling these sorts of community is definitely a form of social and creative "work".
How much work do these creators do on this front? How much is the writing and creating versus the management and community building? What else goes into it all?
Compare and contrast the work done by individuals in the IndieWeb community.
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Early on, circa 2015, there was a while when every first-person writer who might once have written a Tumblr began writing a TinyLetter. At the time, the writer Lyz Lenz observed that newsletters seemed to create a new kind of safe space. A newsletter’s self-selecting audience was part of its appeal, especially for women writers who had experienced harassment elsewhere online.
What sort of spaces do newsletters create based upon their modes of delivery? What makes them "safer" for marginalized groups? Is there a mitigation of algorithmic speed and reach that helps? Is it a more tacit building of community and conversation? How can these benefits be built into an IndieWeb space?
How can a platform provide "reach" while simultaneously creating negative feedback for trolls and bad actors?
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The contemporary email newsletter is not a novel form; often it amounts to a new delivery system for the same sorts of content — essays, explainers, Q&As, news roundups, advice, and lists — that have long been staples of online media. (Subscribe to enough newsletters and sort them the right way, and it’s possible to re-create something like an RSS-feed reader.)
Email delivery apparently isn't much different than RSS. What sorts of functionality do RSS readers provide over email in terms of search, filtering, and presentation? Surely RSS is more powerful at slicing and dicing one's reader data.
How do all these different forms of content fit into the greater set of genres in Western culture?
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You’re sliding into their inbox every morning or every week, and your subscribers can just hit RESPOND and tell you what they think.
There is something to be said about the potential forms of response that newsletters can have. Some have online versions where users can respond and be a direct part of the public conversation, but many also have the ability to reply directly and privately to the author.
How common is this private reply and conversation? Does it contribute to the ecosystem significantly? This article indicates that it's possible and I've heard one or two people mention that it happens. I've yet to see data to indicate that it's a frequent thing though.
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Personas are still crafted, events exhaustively narrated, just now at industrial scale. The newsletters of today can be professional editorial operations, like Politico’s Playbook (which casts its readers as fellow Beltway insiders) or The Skimm (which casts them as brunch-drunk sorority sisters). They can also be scrappier, more idiosyncratic missives akin to personal blogs. Newsletters can be like newspaper columns, cut loose from institutional authority. They can be like podcasts that you cannot absorb while running errands, like zines without the photocopy static, like Instagram with the lifestyle recommendations rendered as text instead of subtext. Many newsletters partake in the limitlessly available navel-gazing of online media commentary. Newsletter writers describe the process of writing a newsletter; creators who monetize their personalities through their newsletters report on the ways that other creators are monetizing theirs.
This seems a reasonable description of the depth and diversity of the newsletter idea.
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These are emails composed for an audience not of one friend but of many fans. These emails are newsletters.
Indication of the morphing of long emails into newsletters.
How does blogging fit into this space and continuum? Blogging as the expansion of ideas to test them out, garner feedback and evolve ideas over time?
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This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
How meta embedded in an article about newsletters...
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- quotes
- niches
- trolling
- meta
- definition
- tummeling
- cultural anthropology
- RSS
- genres
- conversation
- clubs
- read
- newsletters
- harassment
- media
- social media
- creativity
- IndieWeb
- replies
- writing
- impenetrability
- tools for thought
- blogging
- online spaces
- Kicks Condor
- motivations
- Substack
- clickbait
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theoatmeal.com theoatmeal.com
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obsidianroundup.org obsidianroundup.orgAbout1
- Apr 2021
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www.feedblitz.com www.feedblitz.com
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jeetheer.substack.com jeetheer.substack.com
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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I have a feeling some of the money framing in the newsletter space is overblown. Some bigger names with pre-existing platforms (and by this I mean exposure, popularity, voices, and other possible media outlets already) have some serious upside to creating paid newsletters. Many of these platforms are trying to not only capture a slice of these pies, they're trying to leverage those same big names to actively make it seem to the average person that they too could have a paid newsletter (see how easy it is...). The reality is that many of these others are going to spend a lot of time and effort to try to garner pennies on the dollar or ultimately fail. This sort of game works much better in the YouTube space where self-hosting the video and doing distribution is a much higher bar. The VC space for newsletters is going to have a dreadful crash when folks realize that there's more competition in the space than they bargained for.
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Jessica Lessin, the founder and editor in chief of The Information, a newsletter-centric Silicon Valley subscription publication, said part of its edge was “sophisticated marketing around acquiring and retaining subscribers.”
Knowing market efficiencies can significantly help some platforms. Not all platforms have this value built in. Many writers are unlikely to see this sort of value in places like Substack which are trying to buy in bulk while they're experimenting. What happens to well-paid writers a year from now when the experimentation ends or dies completely? Where do they take their business then?
I don't see this ending well for most.
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(Substack has courted a number of Times writers. I turned down an offer of an advance well above my Times salary, in part because of the editing and the platform The Times gives me, and in part because I didn’t think I’d make it back — media types often overvalue media writers.)
This is an important data point. Almost no one is putting any value on editing and other institutional support that outlets provide. Some writers can see at least a little bit of the future.
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Though Substack paid advances to a few dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald.
I keep hearing the same "top names" who are making seven figure sums. Where are the middling names and what are they making?
Why is everyone touting the top and ignoring the snake oil being sold to those at the bottom who think this is going to pan out the same way for them?
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This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were. (Only Twitter retains that power.) Big media cancellation is often an offramp to a bigger income
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- Mar 2021
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craigmod.com craigmod.com
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Ownership is the critical point here. Ownership in email in the same way we own a paperback: We recognize that we (largely) control the email subscriber lists, they are portable, they are not governed by unknowable algorithmic timelines.3 And this isn’t ownership yoked to a company or piece of software operating on quarterly horizon, or even multi-year horizon, but rather to a half-century horizon. Email is a (the only?) networked publishing technology with both widespread, near universal adoption,4 and history. It is, as they say, proven.
This is very IndieWeb in flavor.
It reminds me of Stanley Meyer who would read newspapers and magazines every day and cut out articles which he put into envelopes for his friends and children and mailed out every couple of weeks. Essentially his own newsletter, but by snail mail.
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www.fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com
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This covers a lot of material in the other article I read this morning.
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aram Zucker-Scharff</span> in Ernie Smith on Twitter: "You don’t need Substack. Today’s @readtedium explains how you can self-host your newsletter on the cheap: https://t.co/yp2tLBRS4a" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>03/18/2021 23:48:57</time>)</cite></small>
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thehypothesis.substack.com thehypothesis.substack.com
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I just wanted a way to send out my irregularly-updated newsletter to a couple thousand subscribers without getting caught in a spam filter.
This is the short version of what Substack is and why people want to use it.
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Substack is taking an editorial stance, paying writers who fit that stance, and refusing to be transparent about who those people are.
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- Feb 2021
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www.niemanlab.org www.niemanlab.org
- Dec 2020
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diggingthedigital.com diggingthedigital.com
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Newsletters still miss the networked conversations on the topics, which we know from social networks and forums. I expect that all systems will continue to develop well in the near future, which may include an optional conversation layer about the information.
Frank, a networked newsletter will have the backlinks, but why not do the notifications and display of them using Webmention as a layer on top? Why not let a reader reply to the newsletter via email and then take that content and attach it to the newsletter like a comments section?
Why not have all the things?
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Individuals and companies are discovering that direct contact with the reader via the mailbox is a lot easier and more interesting than the black holes of the social networks dictated by algorithms.
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- Oct 2020
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austinkleon.com austinkleon.com
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Newport is an academic — he makes his primary living teaching computer science at a university, so he already has a built-in network and a self-contained world with clear moves towards achievement.
This is one of the key reasons people look to social media--for the connections and the network they don't have via non-digital means. Most of the people I've seen with large blogs or well-traveled websites have simply done a much better job of connecting and interacting with their audience and personal networks. To a great extent this is because they've built up a large email list to send people content directly. Those people then read their material and comment on their blogs.
This is something the IndieWeb can help people work toward in a better fashion, particularly with better independent functioning feed readers.
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- Nov 2019
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onemanandhisblog.com onemanandhisblog.com
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In a world of publishing platforms that are dominated by venture capital-backed operations, (even the newsletter platform Substack has raised $17.5m in VC funding) this is a refreshing state-of-affairs. The Ghost Foundation has an annual run rate of $1.73m (and posts this publicly) — and hasn't taken VC money. Ghost was actually launched as a Kickstarter, which long-term readers might remember…
Something to watch with respect to this is Jonah Goldberg and Steven Hayes who are working with Substack to put out a membership driven news website.
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