I mis-titled this post. The actual newsletter edition in question is more concerned with how people can support "good journalism." While that is interesting, I thought there were some things in the article that can be applied to professional writing more generally.

First, some context:

With more than 41,000 subscribers, How Things Work is big enough to sell ads...A little research told me that by not having any ads here, I am leaving an amount of money on the table that is very substantial, for a small publication like mine.

And so the author, Nolan Hamilton, proceeded to attempt to land some paying advertisers. However, he noticed something about the process:

I could feel the focus of my mind turning to the question of how to sell ads. I could feel my mental energy being allocated to questions of finance and marketing. This is bad. I only have a certain amount of mental energy and focus to begin with. Every bit of it that is being used to figure out how to sell ads is not being used to think about what I am writing here.

So what? you may think. It's called running a business -- and yes, you have to multitask. But I'm not sure writing should be run as a business, and neither is Hamilton.

Perhaps there are other writers, steely machines, who can compartmentalize the personal and business and editorial operations of their minds with the efficiency of computers, leaving each bucket insulated and unaffected by the operations of the others. That’s not me. If I want to write anything “good,” I need to mostly be thinking about that thing. I need to use most of my mind to learn about it and read about it and go and look at it and ponder and turn over thoughts and conclusions and sentences and paragraphs until I can put them on the page.

This description of the writing process checks out for me: when I try to work on a writing project, it's kind of all or nothing. It takes over and becomes the only thing I'm thinking about pretty much all the time -- with begrudging tolerance of such things as eating and sleeping. If the idea of whether or not the piece will be very popular enters my mind, I usually end up with something that isn't very good (says I, perhaps the people who read what I write feel differently).

If I am spending a significant portion of my time thinking about marketing my publication and selling ads, there is no way that the writing here will not become less thoughtful.

Hamilton points out that newspapers and publishers have long dealt with this problem. They have an advertising team and an editorial team and supposedly there is a wall between the two. Of course, a wise person might question how meaningful such a wall is. We all tend to know on which side our bread is buttered and if we try to ignore that information, it has a way of intruding on our lives.

So, Hamilton has chosen to stick with subscriptions.

The vast majority of How Things Work’s revenue comes from—and will continue to come from—a relatively small percentage of readers who pay six bucks a month or $60 a year.

Hamilton doesn't say how many of his subscribers are paying, but I doubt it's more than 10%. 4100 subscribers * $60 = $246k per year. Not bad, but he also says that he spends a lot of money on doing on the ground reporting, so it's hard to know how much he is clearing. It doesn't matter much for his argument.

Hamilton ends up in a place that was best summarized by Byrne Hobart: "the job of writing them is closer to being a pastor than a journalist."

Pastors tend to ask for money, and they ask people who can pay a little more to donate a little more. That model is awkward, but if you're trying to avoid moral conflicts, you'll have to do something awkward eventually.

This sounds a lot like V4V to me. I don't have much faith in V4V. But what else is there? Advertising and paywalls. Hamilton thinks that advertising is a non-starter, and he has this to say about paywalls:

We all need to pay. If we don’t, two things will happen: A lot of journalism will simply disappear; and a lot of the remaining journalism will retreat behind paywalls, where it will become a luxury good, a trend that is itself detrimental to the public good.

I don't agree with this at all. I tend to think that paywalls are just a bad business model for information. People will copy it and spread it and there isn't much you can do about that -- indeed, you probably don't want to do anything about it. More people wanting to read your stuff is a writer's dream!

This is the same problem that SN has: how do we incentivize good posts? Hopefully, good posts will get good zaps. But how to we incentivize this? Hamilton seems to think the last hope is that there will be some wealthy patrons who zap a lot. Is this a realistic hope?