Short-form Journalism and Me

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

A couple of months ago, EP decided to resume a weekly edition, much briefer  than before, in order to experiment with what Substack called short-form journalism.  There were so many topics to write about. 

Experiment shut down. EP Lite is not for  me. Too expensive of time.

There are at least three species of journalism on Substack. Short means social media, haphazard posts of varying length, often with long skeins of comments and arguments; in other words, social. 

Continuous means a stream of email items arriving more or less daily, usually first thing in the morning – compulsive letters, top-down for the most part.

And there are weeklies, like Adrian Monck, Robert Wright, and Seymour Hersh.

All that content does tend to clutter the inbox. I look at six dailies John Ellis, Adam Tooze, Matthew Yglesias, Arnold Kling, and Brad DeLong; the three weeklies mentioned above; plus Johnsons Russia List.

Since its inception, EP weekly has been committed to a public broadcasting model: a relative handful of paying subscribers support a column available free to anyone, anywhere, who wants to sign on. I hate to give it up. But a weekly column takes two days at a minimum to produce, and EP has a book to finish, family and friends to see.

Paying subscribers will continue to receive articles on (or near) the first Sunday of every month, along with regular reader reports.  But for free subscribers, this is goodbye. Thank you for coming along.