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Dear reader,
I hope you are enjoying “Words for the Wise,” and the wide variety of topics it covers: Science, politics, culture, travel, and pretty much anything that I happen to be interested in. As you can see from the past several months of posting, I am interested in a lot of different things—and I know you are too. As a journalist with 43+ years of experience, and a journalism teacher, I’d like to think that at least some of this content is unique, iconoclastic, surprising, unusual, or in some way different from what you can read elsewhere.
My “business model” for this newsletter is to make you not only want to read it, but also want to support it in whatever way you can. That does not always mean by paying to subscribe, and I have no plans to require that readers pay to access this content. If you like what you are reading, please share the posts; and if you really like it, please consider sending one or more gift subs to friends, family, or others you think might be interested.
To do that, all you have to do is click on this button and follow the instructions:
If you don’t find this newsletter interesting, please let me know that too—I promise not to be offended! I am always open to suggestions, criticisms, and other comments. And if you don’t want it landing in your inbox 2-3 times per week, please don’t hesitate to unsubscribe—but I would be grateful if you wrote and told me your reasons. One old friend, a well-known writer, told me frankly he just didn’t have time to read it, which was fair enough since I had not read his last two books.
But while you think about giving one or more gift subs to this newsletter, I hope you will also think about what is happening in journalism today and the role that you, the consumer, will increasingly play in its future. The profession is bleeding jobs, especially in conventional print media, by the thousands each year. A great deal of this loss is due to the shrinking or outright folding of local newspapers, and local news coverage. As Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan writes in her new book on the subject, this isn’t just bad for readers, it’s bad for democracy. We are living in an Age of Disinformation, and as we can see with the coronavirus pandemic, having accurate knowledge can be a matter of life and death.
As the old business models for journalism crash and burn, many reporters and commenters have taken to the newsletter format, with individual subscriptions that go directly to the writers (with a small cut to the hosting platform, such as Substack, Ghost, etc.) There is one very big advantage to this new way of doing journalism: Reporters and writers are independent, for the most part, of considerations that get in the way of comprehensive reporting, such as the financial interests of publications (which is why “clickbait” has become so ubiquitous), conflicts of interest, fear of lawsuits, etc.
Indeed, long before starting this newsletter, I had gone fully independent in one important area of my journalistic activities, reporting on #MeToo issues. (Please see these two articles in Columbia Journalism Review for more details and why I did that, the challenges I faced, and how I tried to resolve them.)
So by reading and supporting this and other newsletters, you are actually supporting the future of journalism, or at least an important new avenue that journalists and other writers have for communicating directly with the public. And with “Words for the Wise,” you will never see advertising—except for very occasional “house ads” like this one.
So, please give my request some thought. It’s only $5/month or $50/year, unless you want to give more, in which case, don’t let me try and stop you!
Meanwhile, you can look forward to more topical and relevant reporting and commentary, such as this latest post on the Covid-19 origins debate (more news coming this week as the intel agencies report on their findings.)
Thank you, and please keep in touch.
PS—I mentioned above that “Words for the Wise” covers a wide variety of subjects. In doing so, it is bucking against the conventional wisdom about newsletters: Stick to one subject. In fact, many newsletter “experts” and advisers have argued that the most successful newsletters do just that. I’m not sure how true that is—I have seen some notable exceptions—but it is not the aim of this newsletter. At the moment, I am thinking about how often to post, and whether to make up for the eclectic nature of “Words for the Wise” by giving readers more choices, so you can pick and choose what you want to read without losing value.
For example, if you like science, you can be pretty sure of getting one science story a week in your inbox. If you like travel, same deal. Politics too. I know it can be annoying to get things in an already cluttered inbox you don’t really want to read, so over the coming months I will be experimenting with the balance and the formula. Comments and feedback always welcome, of course.