Just a Musing: Made possible by viewers like you
I am the PBS of newsletters
Hello mixers, and happy holidays!
I love the Christmas season. Going all out on decorations and then partying into the wee hours for Christmas Eve is a big part of Filipino culture, and a treasured part of my life since birth. Now that I don’t live near my family, I decorate my apartment and blast Christmas music as much as possible from November 1 (I mostly ignore the fake November holiday1) until I get to fly home and spend our favorite holiday together.
Today’s musing is not actually about Christmas, but the holiday cheer does help keep the desperation and defeat I do feel about today’s topic at bay. Fun, right? Let’s dive in.
There are too many newsletters. I know it, you know it, your mom and her friends probably know it. I write this having unsubscribed from an online magazine’s newsletter just moments ago.
For years, I’ve lamented our limited hours to consume all the books and movies out there begging to be consumed while our TBR and Letterboxd wishlists grow eternally. To now have newsletters added into the mix?? It’s simply too much.
Don’t worry, it’s not lost on me that I write this to you from a newsletter2. I am part of the problem! Or am I? What is the problem exactly?
Certainly to blame, at least partially, is the bleak hellscape that is traditional media these days. Over the past few years, legacy magazines and startup outlets alike have sacked writers in mass layoffs, folded, or both. For many writers, it’s scary to put yourself out there for a full-time writing job knowing that another pivot to video could get you axed at any moment. Many that still have a day job hardly earn a living wage with their writing alone. That means both the employed and unemployed alike must make money somehow, somewhere, with the skills they possess.
Then, of course, there are also relative newbies like me. People who need to write, need to get their name out there, need to have something to show for their English degree.
And that’s how we end up with newsletters.
Instead of all these writers being employed and nurtured by the guys with the big bucks, those guys have left writers to, in turn, go directly to the consumer (that’s you—and me) and their wallets. We end up having to support our favorite writers individually as they each branch out with their own newsletter and/or podcast. The problem is, of course, one consumer only has so much time and money to afford so many separate subscriptions! There are even newsletters, and more traditional outlets, that publish roundups of the best newsletters we should all be subscribed to right now. And while those newsletters may be great, it’s simply not feasible! We cannot subscribe to all those newsletters and read them alongside the newsletter that recommended them in the first place and all the magazines, newspapers, books and more we consume every day.
For example, there are a few writers who I like and want to read more of, but I can only get bits here and there as a free subscriber—I really just can’t be a paid subscriber for all these newsletters. Two of my best friends admitted the other day that they don’t open every newsletter immediately, not even mine. They have to wait, sometimes months, to have time to sit down and give a newsletter the attention they can afford. (For the record, they are both paid subscribers!)
The newsletter overpopulation also makes me feel bad because on the one hand, I want to promote the fun and interesting newsletters I come across, but I also know that people will have to pay to see most of that content. As an added layer of ick, I know that promoting other people’s newsletters may mean my own newsletter misses out on a paid subscriber or more. Each of us having our own paid ventures pits us against each other to fight for the consumer’s limited resources. This topic itself, which I started writing about months ago, has been addressed since then by media outlets like New York Magazine, whose coverage was then covered by the newsletter Deez Links, poetically posing the question of “how many subscriptions can a subscriber subscrippen?”
I don’t have a solution here, and I don’t think there is one that we, the little people, can really impose. Which also sucks! There are so many talented writers whose words deserve to be platformed and read. But I know that as a reader myself, it’s become a lot to take in. As a writer though, I’ll still be here, plugging away each week or so, with you all along for the ride.
May I recommend the newsletter, Look At Your Fish, written by a wickedly smart and handsome writer/editor?
And that I just plugged yet another newsletter in the previous footnote….