"Don't Do This"

Newsletters during wartime

I’ve never wanted a newsletter, first because I was scared to put myself out on the wire and then because I came to believe they were bad for democracy. I have a newsletter now because I can’t fight it anymore.

The former reason was at the forefront when Substack came to me¹ in the early days and offered me one of those sweet, sweet $100k deals. I was working at MTV at the time and my Crooked Media podcast had taken off, so as a guaranteed rate it would have been a pay cut.

Hamish explained over and over that the upside was unlimited, but they wanted me to cut all ties to my existing work. They would give me the guaranteed pot of money if I agreed to make Substack my only home for original content. They also wanted three newsletters a week.

You might thing that, as a former blogger, this would seem like cake, like pie, like falling off a log. You might think I’m used to being a sole proprietor. But my production at Wonkette had been fueled by alcohol and panic. Booze kept me thinking too hard about what I wrote; it gave me confidence and the ability to let go of misfires. Or appear to let go of them. People who know me from that period might remember the way I agonized over posts that either didn’t do well or drew heavy fire. I could summon the pose of bravado, but every verbal sling and arrow bled my confidence out. I would pour bourbon in to keep going.

In certain circles, I’m still best known for the Washingtonienne debacle. My behavior during that period haunts me. I don’t believe I did anything wrong; she came to me with her story. All I did was publish it and, unwisely, party with her. Neither of us wore formal wear or had our dinners at the Washington Hilton but celebrating with sources is an accepted form of journalism in D.C., it just usually involves politicians and not young women who trade favors for home appliances.²

My regret is that a should have known better than to think a woman can write candidly about ass-fucking and an affair — and enjoy writing about those things — and not have that subject be what defines her. I rode the publicity well enough, but, you might have noticed, I didn’t leverage it into the career people wanted to give me. I turned down gossip gigs and non-fiction books. She and I wound up producing competing fictionalized versions of our stories. I don’t know about her, but the novel I wrote was a lot about trying to salvage something dignified from the wreckage of scandal.³

And, in the aftermath, I kept the sarcasm and the eye for absurdity but I’ve been… serious. It’s taken twenty years but I think I’ve accumulated enough work that Washingtonienne not the only thing people think of.⁴ I’ve been, you know, a serious-ish journalist. I’ve taken my work seriously even if other people don’t. Whatever scathing bits of my writing you might enjoy stem from the disappointment of an idealist, not the cynicism of a nihilist — Diogenes was himself just looking for an honest man.

After Wonkette, I worked for Time and then GQ, pushing myself into square holes, still drinking to help myself not care.

That worked until it didn’t.

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Sobriety made me even more serious; I cared — care — too much. Sobriety made it impossible to just write what I thought; I thought about what other people might think. I thought about whether what I was writing was good enough to compete with all the other great writing out there. I got scared and I don’t have anything to make me not scared.

Don’t get me wrong, sobriety has also made my writing better. All that thinking can be turned into a superpower when it’s not a weapon. But, you know, it’s easier to handle a weapon than a superpower.

Which brings me to the era of the newsletters. Substack came to me when the getting was good and I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the faith in myself that newsletters require; I didn’t have the discipline; I wasn’t sure what I had to say was all that important. These might be bad reasons to not have a newsletter. I regret not taking the gig now; but you only know what you know when you know it. You only can do what you can do until you can do something else.

Smash cut to today, to this Moment if not this exact time (Sunday, June 9, 10:40am CT). Three years ago, Crooked and I parted ways. I got a book contract and a divorce settlement that kept me afloat for awhile but a job? I haven’t a steady gig since 2021; at one point, I even went back to Substack, hat in hand. I returned with an empty hat.⁵

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten a lot of company in ranks of the full-time freelances and the unwillingly unemployed. What are the numbers now for layoffs in the media industry? 30,000 in the past year? Al Jazeera compared it to the housing crisis. I’ve been telling people it’s like the end of American auto manufacturing. These jobs are not coming back.

And journalists have responded with newsletters, but newsletters won’t save us. They won’t save journalists. They won’t save journalism. And America, without journalism, needs saving.

Newsletters seem to be a natural step from having been in a newsroom only because newsrooms are now collections of brands and not collections of people. I’m in favor of independent voices and I’m aware of how the market incentivizes bland, “view from nowhere” superficial reporting. But newsletters are only a solution in supporting independent voices if you ask thousands of people to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to support individual writers. And those individual writers, as wonderful as their voices might be, don’t get edited, don’t get fact-checked, don’t get insurance, don’t get the banter and growth that come with the discussions that happen in a bullpen. The kind of person who is a fan of mine, a fan of newsletters and transparency might disagree but those intra-journalist/editor-journalist discussions are often better had out of public view. We can have meta-public debates about the range of them. I am in favor of seeing the sausage get made every once in a while (especially when the decisions are really dumb⁶) but discussions about appropriateness and news value, and — god help me, why don’t more people say this — whether or not a story has been done to death. Don’t you, likely progressive person reading this, wish that the Times had been a little less eager to make “her emails” front-page news?

Newsletters don’t support enterprise journalism (unless they become publications, and a few of them have). Newsletters, the atomized self-published ventures that laid-off writers are forced into, perpetuate quick takes. You can’t pursue a story that doesn’t pan out for a newsletter. A newsletter can’t break a story like Watergrate — a story that started out small, that met with dead ends, that didn’t sell newspapers, that put the publication in legal jeopardy, that took weeks and months of shoe leather and, maybe the most obvious divergence from newsletters now, two reporters!

Newsletters put people in information silos. People will only pay for what they want to hear. People are unlikely to pay for things that upset them. (You, dear reader, may be different. I hope you are.)

I’ll bring this back to Civil War, because I can bring just about everything back to Civil War: Do you think the newsletter journalism is getting us closer or further away from polarization that we can’t walk back? Does newsletter journalism promote the understanding or self-perpetuate existing beliefs? A darker, just as important question: Would you trust newsletters to cover a civil war?

But, ha. I just realized something. The problem isn’t that newsletters won’t save journalism but traditional publications will. The problem is that everything — even the Washington Post — is becoming a newsletter.

The wonderful Lyz Lenz wrote about how she’s cultivated her incredibly successful newsletter (and now leveraged into a best-selling book). Her wisdom is inspiring and, re-reading it now, I can see that her success seems largely based on re-creating the best parts of working at a traditional publication. She works in community and has a kind of self-made bullpen. She believes in her ideas and doesn’t care if some of her editions are not popular. She talks about pursuing stories that don’t pan out because a boss isn’t pressuring her. She also looks at data sets and comments to see what does resonate. She has hired people will different backgrounds and points of view to tell stories she can’t. She has a successful newsletter because it’s not a newsletter.⁷

She also works really hard: she calls herself a “type A personality” and a perfectionist. I don’t know if I am those things anymore. I don’t know if I can start a publication. I just want to write and finding places to put my writing is harder than it’s ever been.

I’m here on Substack now because wanting to write has finally come to outweigh needing people to hear it. Wanting to write has come to outweigh knowing what I have to say is new or better than what’s already out there. This is sloppy and there are ideas here I want to come back to. You will see these ideas again. Maybe my obsessions will overwhelm you; I often stay interested in things after they stop being interesting to other people. At a publication, an editor would stop me… and they might be right to. You’ll stop reading me. I’ll lose you and your subscription.

But the side of me that wants to write doesn’t care.

Welcome to Civil Wars All the Time, a newsletter about the movie Civil War and other fights we have with ourselves.

1. This was wrong before. This is why I hate doing a newsletter. Imperfections! Easily-caught imperfections!

2. This remains the saddest and most vivid detail of her story for me: One of staffers she dated gave her a blender in gratitude for her attentions.

3. In retrospect, I should have just kept writing novels but no publisher offered another contract for fiction. The pressure was to write salaciously, or at least give my “insider’s view.” I have never felt like an insider and would have felt more comfortable making shit up, but, well, here we are.

4. Still, it comes up. Just a month or so ago, I was talking to a journalism professor and he mentioned that’s how he first came across my name. He laughed and I laughed, too. Ha. Ha.

5. I would desperately like to not be on Substack now, for all the reasons. I’m here because its UI is the easiest for navigate and the most flexible in terms of what media you can add by a lot, a lot, a lot. It is easy to make bad writing look pretty, which is nice when you’re not sure about your writing. I’ve chosen its ease over the higher hurdles (and less elegance) of Buttondown and Ghost and Wordpress because my bandwidth is scarce right now. If someone would like to hold my hand in migrating off of it, like, ok, maybe do it for me, it would be a kindness. For now, here I am, and I hope to have it in me to transition off very soon. This is a bad place! All the reasons!

6. There have been some news-value decision doozies in the “dumb” category lately. Talking about you, Washington Post! A lot about you!

7. She also got a $60k Substack “grant;” I guess that’s what they started calling them? Yay her!