200 Words

Making Newsletters Pay

So you’ve created your content, and now you need to make it pay.

First off, there’s the outsourcing options.

Ko-Fi allows you to set up a Tip Jar, where people can leave one-off payments.

Patreon allows people to subscribe, paying a regular amount to go past your paywall. Terms and conditions apply, Patreon expects you to host content on their site.

Substack allows you to gather followers, but (even ignoring their views on free speech for nazis) it’s a trap. Because when you drill down, they’re not really your followers, they’re Substack’s followers.

The other option is to build your own.

All platforms degrade over time, the only way to truly build an audience is to use every other platform to point people to your own website.

Create once, share everywhere.

Stripe is a fairly powerful tool, and allows you to set up your own subscription or tip jar options on your site.
You can probably do the same with PayPal, but I’ve always found it a bit more clunky than Stripe, plus I really don’t like some of the owners, so I use Stripe where I can. On the other hand, there’s the advantage that almost everyone has a Paypal (or everyone of a certain age; I suspect Revolut is winning over the younger crowd).

You can also find tools to build your own paywalls, or you can follow the Guardian model. Allow everyone to access your site, but also offer a Subscription Supporter option, while understanding that only a minority of readers will contribute.

Making Podcasts Pay

All of the above also applies to podcasts, though with venues like Spotify instead of Substack. You can also look at advertising, either pre-roll services which insert a commercial automatically, or though sponsorship and advertising you sell yourself.

The ongoing collapse of Twitter as a meaningful forum – and if we’re lucky, the imminent irrelevance of several other major social media giants – offers a unique opportunity to journalists, in particular to younger writers and students without established brand personas.

Seize the day.

Delete your old posts.

Change your name, or rather, adjust your existing name. It doesn’t need to be a complete change. Style yourself with an initial. Change a name to less or more formal. Joseph Bloggs becomes Joe Bloggs, or JT Bloggs, or J Thomas Bloggs, or Seosamh Ó Blogaire. How far you want to go depends on how big a change you’re planning. Maybe just enough to evade the search engines, or maybe you’ve got a whole new career path in mind. The sky’ the limit.

And of course, it doesn’t have to be just the kids who are scrubbing those awkward adolescent posts. Anyone can reinvent themselves. So go ahead, create a new online persona. Delete that old Twitter account. Make X the ex-site.

And why stop there? Kill the old LinkedIn profile. Get yourself a new email address.

Leave behind the past, and think for a while about what the future might look like.

Own Your Words.

It’s a simple idea, but what does it mean?

It means, quite simply, that if your words, your creations, are on a site you don’t own, then you aren’t in control.

The website you trust with your words could put up a paywall tomorrow morning, cutting off your audience.

Or they could go bankrupt, or get hacked, or just deleted because a billionaire has a sulk.

So you need to own your words. Or your audio podcast. Or your photos and videos and drawings, and every other work you created.

You need to own your words. And that begins with owning your own website.

Ownership isn’t free.

You can probably pick up a dot.com or dot.ie for a few euro (though if money’s no object, some domain pricetags can run to thousands). Hosting starts around a tenner a year, but can cost more if your site gets a lot of traffic, and maybe up to €50 for https.

Themes, content management systems, newsletter platforms and the like can also push up costs, but if you can invest the time to learn, there’s usually an open source alternative.

And ultimately, it’s worth it to own your own words.

December 2023. A baseless claim is posted to a Facebook community group. A far-right politician repeats the claim under privilege in Leinster House, without evidence. A website publishes the story, again without any evidence. This is how disinformation spreads.

To use an idiom from 1980s horror movies, the call is coming from inside the house. Some elected councillors, TDs and senators are already spouting far right talking points. Charitably, perhaps they do not realise they are doing this. But they are not all idiots. At least some one them are consciously and deliberately provoking hate and division for the sake of a handful of votes.

News media fall into the same trap. Again, sometimes the call comes from inside the building, repeated and amplified this time not for votes, but for clicks and ratings, whether deliberately and consciously, or simply because industry and business incentives encourage journalists, editors and producers to chase the heat for short term gains.

What can we do to combat this?

To begin, an RTÉ fully funded and index linked from the central exchequer (and that means without commercials)would create a national news organisation without the perverse incentives to chase cheap ratings.

It would be a start.

I have too many computers.
My main laptop computer, the one I’m most likely to use for serious work, is a Lenovo Thinkpad X280. It’s a slim, sleek black machine. Black has always been a trademark identity for the Thinkpad range. Going back to when it was owned by IBM, their image was the computer for Serious Business. No neon-effect boy-racer gaming lights under the keypad here, no flashing colours or polished surfaces, just a solid matte-finished box made to carry its weight, a workhorse.
Past its best, but there’s a solid powerful chip under the hood, and it will process image editing and, even more important in the last few years, audio editing for podcasts. That’s what I’ve been doing with it for the last week. Recording audio and video, and editing the audio files for podcast.
It’s old now. The keyboard is gone, though that was really a self inflicted wound. I broke the firmware doing some repairs, when I should have known better and let it alone If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, or you end up with new breaks you can’t fix. So without a touchpad, I have to use a mouse. No big deal, I mostly did anyway. Fingertip control isn’t really precise enough when you’re editing audio clips.
The battery life is poor. With earlier thinkpads, I could have just switched it out for a new battery. The early thinkpads were chunky boxes, on purpose. Not just because it sold their solid business image, but because they were built to a modular design. In theory, any part of the machine could be replaced, or upgraded.
Newer boxes work on the Jonny Ives model. Steve Jobs in his later years decided thinness was how to distinguish Macs and phones to look futuristic, and where Apple leads, everyone else eventually follows, even the solid black boxes from Lenovo.
Eventually, shortly after Lenovo took over the Thinkpad range from IBM, they finally caved to the Jonny Ives design hegemony, and redesigned their range for a more modern and slimlined look.
So this is a thin thinkpad, with a locked in battery which, which it could in theory be replaced, is so wedded to the machine that it’s probably going to be cheaper to replace the machine than take it apart.
I have other machines. A smaller Lenovo, an Ideapad, all bland silver with a smaller screen, indistinguishable from any of several smaller notepads and chromebooks, but with a battery life that makes it the best choice on the road or reporting from a courtroom or other news event. An the desktop, big and imposing, for some even more heavy duty work than the X280 on occasion. And there’s one of the older, boxier Thinkpads, which these days is near the end of its useful life, and mostly serves as a sort of searchable backup drive holding copies of synced cloud files I need to access quickly without waiting for downloads.
But the Thinkpad X280 is special. I don’t want to replace it. The X280 model was launched in 2018, but I bought mine second hand in 2019.
I arranged the purchase over Twitter, and I drove to Belfast to pick it up from Lyra McKee.
She was in a rush. We talked about Donegal and meeting her partnerthere in the Summer when I was on holidays, and she apologised she didn’t have time to stop for a coffee and a chat, but work and deadlines were pressing.
It was the last time we spoke in person. A few weeks later, she went to observe and report on a riot in the Creggan in Derry, and someone fired a shot into the crowd, killing her.
So I won’t be getting rid of the X280 any time soon, even if it is superceded by newer machines.
I miss you, kid. Here’s looking at you.

One of the first pieces I wrote on the X280, the day after Lyra’s death.

Anois teacht an Earraigh
beidh an lá dúl chun shíneadh,
Is tar eis na féil Bríde
ardóigh mé mo sheol.
Go Coillte Mach rachad
ní stopfaidh me choíche
Go seasfaidh mé síos
i lár Chondae Mhaigh Eo.

I gClár Chlainne Mhuiris
A bheas mé an chéad oíche,
Is I mballa taobh thíos de
A thosós mé ag ól
Go Coillte Mách rachad
Go ndéanfad cuairt mhíosa ann
I bhfogas dhá mhíle
Do Bhéal an átha Mhóir.

Fágaim le huacht é
go n-éiríonn mo chroí-se
Mar a éiríonn an ghaoth
nó mar a scaipeann an ceo
Nuair a smaoiním ar Cheara
nó ar Ghaileang taobh thíos de
Ar Sceathach an Mhíle
nó ar phlánaí Mhaigh Eo.

Cill Aodáin an baile
a bhfásann gach ní ann,
Tá sméara is subh craobh ann
is meas de gach sórt,
Is dá mbéinnse i mo sheasamh
i gceartlár mo dhaoine
D’imeodh an aois díom
is bheinn arís óg.

Bíonn cruithneacht is coirce,
fás eorna is lín ann,
Seagal i gcraobh ann,
arán plúir agus feoil,
Lucht déanta poitín
gan licence á dhíol ann,
Móruaisle na tíre ann
ag imirt is ag ól.

Tá cur agus treabhadh
is leasú gan aoileach
Is iomaí sin ní ann
nár labhair me go fóill,
áitheanna is muilte
ag obair gan scíth ann,
Deamhan caint ar phingin cíosa
ná dada dá shórt.

The Tennant specials were fun.

But also, damn you IMDb, I was promised Susan Foreman.

Fairly sure what I’ve liked most is the return of the classic white and off-white Tardis control room after 18 years of guardrails, pavement grilles, salt crystals and airship girders.

Christmas Day special, the Doctor dances. And sings. And fans will go out of their minds with theories about Mrs Flood.

It’s nice to be able to look forward to Doctor Who again.

You can follow my updates here.
I’m also @faduda@mastodon.ie.

O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!