Five For Friday (One Day Late), November 23rd

Substack, Mediated Media, OMG Ozempic, Okay Zoomer, Personal

Next week, 18 family members will be seated at our dining table and two folding tables for Thanksgiving dinner. The menu is on a google doc with people adding their contributions to the list. We still need someone to make the stuffing. Steve is making cranberry sauce right now using his great-grandmother’s recipe. It makes a giant mess, but it’s totally worth it.

I didn’t have a chance to publish my Five For Friday list yesterday, so it’s happening today instead.

Substack Success

I’m enjoying reading how super successful substackers describe their formulas for success. Writing two or three times a week is essential, says Nate Silver.

Max Read says: “What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing--or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept--and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of “thinking through,” to which subscribers are invited.”

While not a heavy-hitter myself, I have been doing this blogging/newsletter stuff for a long time.

I know what works:

• 90 percent predictable/10 percent random. People want to be surprised now and then. So, throw in a post about Prince Harry or your passion for airplanes. People like your crazy shit, too.

• Mainstream respectability. If you’re a professor, a published author in a mainstream press, or the director of a think tank, people will take you more seriously. Tout your credentials.

• Write fast. Write well.

• Know your shit.

• Grab people with a headline and a lede. Most people won’t get past that.

• Promote all the time. Every single post. I actually keep a log of everything that I produce with a column for social media distribution and cross fertilization.

• Link to your friends, and they’ll link to you.

  

Mediated Mainstream Media

My 25-year old son is a huge political junkie. Apple, tree. At the moment, he has very well-formed (and heated) opinions about Trump’s cabinet picks.

My son never reads the New York Times or any other newspaper as his first stop for news. He’ll read New York Times articles only when someone links to them on a Reddit thread, which is where he gets almost all of his political information.

The last election really pointed a whole new media landscape with a huge age and class divisions. CNN and The Atlantic aren’t the first place for getting political information for anybody anymore. They are secondary sources. Young people, like my son, are going first to podcasts or Reddit first. And us, older folks, are doing the same thing, but we’re going to our own media mediators.

Blogs, podcasts, and substack, like Reddit, are media mediators. They mediate mainstream news. Trusted sources, like Heather Cox Richardson or Joe Rogan, tell their readers the highlights of the day, in bite-sized bits.

These media mediators are decentralized, which makes it difficult for politicians to know how to reach them. They aren’t governed by traditional media ethics, because they aren’t traditional media; that opens up a whole bunch of other issues.

Understanding the new media landscape should be a political priority. I haven’t gotten into the Bluesky v. X debate. That’s maybe for Monday.

Ozempic OMG

Can we talk about Arianna Grande’s super skinny bod? Holy shit. I think she and all her cast mates are going to totally disappear before the end of this press tour. Does anybody think that emaciation is a good look? Please get that girl a cheeseburger.

Ozempic is revolutionary for the seriously obese, but for everyone else, it’s just awful. Do not normalize eating disorders!

Okay, Zoomer!

Lots of chatter in real life about Zoomers, who don’t want to work hard and expect huge salaries.

Personal

I wrote a personal bloggy-style post earlier in the week for my autism newsletter. I’ve been working 12-hour days, as I’m developing two autism businesses and growing my newsletter writing. I talk about that and the autistic kid there.

Catching Up

Watching: Shetland

Travel: Tomorrow, we’re catching 9:30 mass at the St. Ignatius on Park Avenue, and then going to the Siena exhibit at the Met. Last week, the boys and I checked out “the ghost bridge” in a drained reservoir in New Jersey.

Pictures: Me. Ghost bridge pix. More pictures here.