Have been mulling a substack newsletter for a while, but since I need to work for a living, the risk of publishing doesn't justify the rewards. When I started writing seriously about 20+ years ago, the upside was to become a columnist, which was a kind of social tenure that allowed you to socially move and think freely. The endgame was to become a kind of public intellectual on the entry to a spectrum that included writers like Christopher Hitchens, Anne Applebaum, Niall Ferguson, Camille Paglia, Stephen Fry, Nassim Taleb, even Malcolm Gladwell or even Naomi Klein and lately to a lesser extent Matt Taibbi, Glen Greenwald and Laura Poitras. While most of these are academics, even 10 years ago there was a kind of public intellectual role that isn't really viable today. At the time, most of those writers if they hit hard times could still pick up a gig teaching, consulting or a fellowship to pay the rent, but today if they crossed a line, they wouldn't be able to get a greeter job at walmart. Maybe we're getting higher quality thinkers on the so-called "intellectual dark web" because the risks they take are so much greater than those taken by the Gore Vidals, Hunter S. Thompsons, H.L. Menckens, Seymour Herschs, Martin Amis's, and Hannah Arendts, who wrote in a time where there was a boundary between the public and the private spheres that enabled them to write challenging things, and this drives off anyone not willing to embark on a career-suicide pact to have their voice heard.
It's as though there has been a polarization and your option as a writer is to become Charles Bukowski or nothing (and by nothing I mean Paul Krugman). If it is indeed a trend that reporters are going rogue and writing news letters, I'd say it's another example of this polarization of risk, and they will start pulling punches, and they won't be able to do their best work without institutional air cover. Perhaps I'm just not brave, but to me the risk/reward of doing a blog or newsletter isn't quite there.
Reading the article and the comments, the economics of a newsletter are that it needs to be something that imposes opportunity cost on scrolling newsfeed crap on facebook, reddit, and to a lesser extent, HN. Viewed this way, the competitor of a newsletter isn't other newsletters, it's the junk feeds of readers. It's an exciting time to be a writer because we all know the demand for content is infinite, it's just a question of how to harness it and secure the means to be able to keep producing it when it lands something heavy and provocative.
Whether or not politics is interested in me (it isn't, just in my subservience and tax dollars), the market of people who write about politics is saturated by people who look, think and act the same as you.
Not really, I'm pretty awesome, most writers today aren't. But don't sell yourself short, I have no doubt there's a movement that would be interested in using you.
It's as though there has been a polarization and your option as a writer is to become Charles Bukowski or nothing (and by nothing I mean Paul Krugman). If it is indeed a trend that reporters are going rogue and writing news letters, I'd say it's another example of this polarization of risk, and they will start pulling punches, and they won't be able to do their best work without institutional air cover. Perhaps I'm just not brave, but to me the risk/reward of doing a blog or newsletter isn't quite there.
Reading the article and the comments, the economics of a newsletter are that it needs to be something that imposes opportunity cost on scrolling newsfeed crap on facebook, reddit, and to a lesser extent, HN. Viewed this way, the competitor of a newsletter isn't other newsletters, it's the junk feeds of readers. It's an exciting time to be a writer because we all know the demand for content is infinite, it's just a question of how to harness it and secure the means to be able to keep producing it when it lands something heavy and provocative.