This summer I intend to engage in a regular blogging practice—a sort of retro endeavor in 2026, I suppose, but it has arisen for me as a necessary one. It is not about any topic in particular. It is, rather, an exercise in offering a series of interventions that have been stewing in me for a while, as well as those that surface through the practice.
The more common way to do this sort of thing in 2026, it seems, is to start an email newsletter, and most likely a Substack in particular. I am not doing that. I am just posting on my personal website, in the category ungloriously called Summer 2026. But why? I will explain, in the form of a commentary on the commentariat’s attention economy of the moment.
Reason 1: This isn’t an exit
I have gotten in trouble sometimes for suggesting that journalists starting newsletters are scabs. That’s not nice, and I’m sorry. But in some cases it is not wrong. Commentators with a large and loyal audience quit their jobs at a newsroom—which hires support staff, investigative reporters, and others who have no such followings—and bring a decent chunk of their economic value with them. The newsletter service and payment platforms get a cut. Money moves from institutional support to influencer economies. The commentators get some newfound freedom. But if we don’t have robust journalistic institutions doing news-gathering work, what is there to comment on?
People who have used newsletters to establish new spaces of creative freedom and community, I am happy for you! And it is neat that old, open protocols like email (SMTP) and podcasts (RSS) are enabling all this. Just beware about trading imperfect institutions for monopolistic platforms.
I am not hereby trying to depart from my term of service to the University of Colorado, or the academic vocation I have found myself in, but rather to serve them better with some fresh thinking.
Reason 2: This isn’t essential
The superpower of the newsletter genre is to deliver must-have information directly to a fairly small and specialized readership. My favorite chapter of Substacker-scholar Claire Bond Potter’s book Political Junkies was the one about I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which thrived in the 1950s and ’60s; Marilyn Monroe bought subscriptions for every member of Congress. It was leftist wonkery for political insiders. I am a devoted reader of Casey Newton’s Platformer, not always because I want to but because it has come to feel like a necessity in my career as a media scholar focused on the platform economy. Both Stone and Newton used to work for news-gathering institutions but departed in order to do a more specialized and niche-y sort of news-gathering.
A lot of my favorite newsletters are simply digests—lists of essential links that help constitute a shared and focused discourse. I rely a lot these days on The Stakehold, on employee ownership, and Stefaan Verhulst’s Digest, on digital governance. They are super useful for me to keep updated on topics I’ve written entire books on. But I wouldn’t expect you’d necessarily want to subscribe if you don’t share those professional commitments. They’re super specific.
Is it really sustainable for us all to publish to newsletters, however non-essential our utterances are?
Nothing I will publish here is going to be essential for most people, and taken together they will be essential for nobody but me. They are reflections on scattered topics. I’ll share them on various social media, and you can follow those links if you want. You can even subscribe to the RSS feed. But I won’t presume any of it requires space in your inbox.
Reason 3: This is a space and a time
One thing I love about the practice of blogging is that it is an invitation into a personal sort of place. I started my first blog as a student, using my own hand-coded PHP files on a web server. This site is hosted with WordPress, using a modification of someone else’s theme, but I hope it still feels like you’re coming into a space I’ve made for you. It is hosted on the servers of May First Movement Technology, a co-op I have been a member of for over a decade. I’ll illustrate with photographs of the world around me as I write. Welcome!
A newsletter comes to you. A blog asks you if you want to come over here. Come only if you like.
The last time I blogged regularly was in my early days as a journalist, when I was starting out as a writer and didn’t have many options for publication. So, retro—guilty as charged. I associate blogging with new beginnings. I don’t know where this period of practice will lead. The duration is part of the practice.
Perhaps you are encountering these posts as they come out, or perhaps all at once, or in some other sort of way. I’m claiming this time as mine, for me, but you can enter it in whatever temporality you choose.
If you do really like newsletters, by the way, you can subscribe to mine here; I only post to it very occasionally for larger announcements, such as a new book coming out.
And if anything moves you, I hope you’ll reach out by email or social media. Thank you for being here.