Let's Try This Again

I’m back. And this time I'm here with another tweak to what this “newsletter” is going to be moving forward.

Good morning.

It’s been about eight months since you’ve last heard from me, but now I’m back. And this time I come with another tweak to what this “newsletter” is going to be moving forward.

I put “newsletter” in quotes because Substack isn’t really a newsletter platform anymore and probably never really was. It’s always really been a blogging tool or CMS with a built-in email distribution system. But now it has both a text-based social media component (Notes) as well as a community component (the Substack app).

Since all of the Social media platforms have begun to collapse in on themselves and go after the same goal (entertainment) using basically the same features just called by different names, I’ve been spending most of my time on Reddit and, increasingly, on the Substack app. 

Substack Notes isn’t great, but it does feel simpler and more useful than Twitter is now. And I don’t even want to spend time on Threads. It’s a helpful way to catch up on what people whose opinions I care about are doing—and it's mainly a way to learn about new pieces of writing that have been posted, which is what I used to really use Twitter for anyway.

Reddit remains Reddit, but the service and amount of organized information around topics and communities that you can explore based on how interested you are in them sourced from reliable and, of course, unreliable sources is incredibly useful and entertaining. It scratches the same itch that Twitter always scratched for me but feels less addicting. I can dip into a community (say, /r/Eagles or /r/Sixers or /r/Bon_Appetit or /r/billsimmons) for 10 minutes or so and then be done for several hours. 

I feel less of a need to check things than I used to. And I think that’s a good thing. I haven’t done any kind of social media diet or purge. I’ve just started to ask myself what I need and what is a good use of my time and have used apps accordingly. (“Roger that, sir. Have used apps accordingly.”)Plus the way we used the internet in the 2010s is slowly ending and morphing into something new has helped as well.

This is all a long way of saying that I feel more and more like the way I’ll navigate the internet is popping around to random blogs through the Substack app (at least for now) or another platform in the future. Who actually spends time on websites anymore? That’s the main question I ask myself at work. Most of us are in apps of some kind or another, whether on our phone or on our smart TV. Articles, and the mobile or desktop web sites they live on, kind of just come and go.

Because of that, my own Substack is just going to kind of become a blog. My favorite part of writing this newsletter when I started was doing the “A Little Bit of Culture” section. I don’t have the time, talent, or patience to focus on thematic essays delivered in a “season” format.

So, moving forward, look out for once or twice a week notes from me about music, movies, writing, culture in general, and even some media business/audience development stuff when I really feel like talking about that outside of work hours.

I’ll kick things up here in August and see how momentum lasts when I take a long trip to Italy in September. Maybe I can make subscribing to whatever this thing is worth it for you.