Five Years!
Thoughts on building the future of media for a half-decade -- and an invitation to join us for the ride
Five years ago, this little experiment was born. I started The Ink somewhat on a whim. A plague was eating through the world. Already divided, we were now also disconnected. The old sources of truth were struggling to persuade people of their legitimacy, or even to hold their attention.
But there was the promise of something new: Build an archipelago of smaller media, not to replace the big institutions but to complement them. Create spaces where writers could connect more directly with readers, and readers could directly patronize writers, giving them the freedom and independence to tell the truth.
This month, The Ink hits its fifth anniversary. Looking back, it seems so improbable that this entire ecosystem of communal publications could have grown the way it has. And at the heart of it all is you, our readers, and, above all, our supporting subscribers, who give us our purpose and make what we do possible.
I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned and observed along the way.
One is about the way traditional media and the new newsletter complex interact. The simple, indeed facile, story one can tell is of one replacing the other. But what I’ve seen is more interesting and complex. The newsletter world generally continues to rely on traditional media for resource-intensive original reporting, a.k.a. sending people on planes and trains to be in the room where things happen. There is a base of front-line reporting provided by the established places that society doesn’t seem able to live without, at least not for now.
But newsletters have something important to offer the established press in turn. Newsletters, I think, are permission expanders for the old line. Freed from bosses and bureaucracy and nervous shareholders, newsletters can tell it like it is. And you know who reads newsletters a lot? Traditional media people. It’s their big little secret. And when they see a more unsparing way of framing authoritarianism, or a more insightful way of making meaning of disparate events, connecting the dots, or a more engaging way of covering music, the big places emulate the small ones. The small places, therefore, play the role of helping the big ones avoid the fate of the dinosaurs. This is a symbiosis I don’t think we talk enough about.
Another observation is how much social trust has changed. It seems allergic to institutions of every kind right now. But people — people it can handle. This new newsletter media is based on an actual relationship. I write for you at The Ink, but I also know your names and check in on your local projects you’ve told me about; you connect with one another, help each other, and provide resources to each other. I have realized that people were more done than I ever understood with trusting anonymous buildings. What makes media more trustworthy now is that it has a face to it — but also a community around it. This is an older-world kind of trust that is becoming important again in media. I trust you because I know you and because I am enmeshed in relationships. What this means in practice is that many of our old methods of lending authority — fact-checking, calling people on different sides of an issue, documenting in person — do not on their own create authority. Those traditional forms of authority need to be melded with human connection for social trust to kick in.
A third observation is that people desperately want to know things, are frantically curious, and are voracious for good information — all the premature obituaries for the news be damned. What is dead are the business models. The hunger to know is not. The hunger to feel part of something is not. Not knowing how to make money from something doesn’t mean that thing is unwanted. It just means you don’t know how to make money from it. When I was coming up in journalism, I absorbed so much pessimism about whether anyone really cared about keeping up with the news. These last five years have shown me that people want more, want to go deeper, want to understand the thing behind the thing. But you have to engage them and earn their trust.
A final thought is that there has been a lot of discussion and speculation about how the fragmented world of newsletters will be aggregated again. Will things be merged and acquired, and a new wave of big players rise? I don’t know the answer. But it seems to me that what each of us has built here is not a future media empire in embryo but rather something different altogether: a world of intellectual microclimates where you read this and I read that and she reads the third thing, and we didn’t all watch Walter Cronkite last night, but it’s O.K., and now we meet in the public square, and we put together a story from fragments. In this new media landscape, maybe we are not all on the same page. Maybe we lose certain same-page advantages, but maybe we also lose the catastrophic social cost of Fox News breaking millions of brains? Maybe it makes for a more resilient society with many more clashing ways of seeing but fewer tides of groupthink. I don’t know, but I am here for the ride.
Thank you for being part of The Ink these five years — whether you were with us from the beginning or have only recently joined. We do what we do for you. And we cannot do it without the support of our paying subscribers, who put their money where their mouth is and stand up for independent, truth-telling media. If you want to be part of what we’re building, join us today. Happy anniversary, y’all!
We believe newsletters like this will be a critical part of the infrastructure of reality in the era ahead, and from what we’ve heard from subscribers, we think if you’re reading this, you agree. We do this for you — but we can’t do it without you. So if you haven’t yet joined our community, we invite you to keep building the future of media with us.
To celebrate our fifth anniversary, and to entice you to celebrate along with us by making it official with us, through this weekend we’re offering a choose-your-own adventure deal. We’re offering three different options. Pick your favorite: A free month, 50 percent off for one year, or 20 percent off forever.
Follow the links below to read some of the posts our readers told us they liked most from the past five years of The Ink:
I really appreciate these observations. I would add that you and many others in the new media build community directly by addressing readers and by bringing in people with whom you have relationships so you share and circulate those relationships with us. Thank. you.
I am grateful beyond words to have found The Ink. Anand, your insights open new avenues of thought every time I come here - thank you.
One more idea I would add to your list of observations is the "newsletter" network. Through the various interviews, podcasts, etc., there is a WONDERFUL cross-pollination occurring.
I hear your conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, then I hear her conversation with Rory Truex, on The Civic Forum, and I read her Lucid posts (which is how I found the Ink!), each expanding my understandings.
Anat Shenker-Osorio, whom I have followed for years, also comes to the Ink - and pretty much everywhere else, again, the interactions each offer something new.
And soooo many more...
I feel like there is magic, as others have mentioned, in all of these circulating conversations - maybe percolating synergistically.