Happy Substack Anniversary to Me!

Drezner's World is now one year old. I have some thoughts (duh)....

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Last week Drezner’s World celebrated its one-year anniversary. After seven years of blogging on my own, five years of blogging for Foreign Policy, and eight years of writing for the Washington Post, this Substack thing still feels new and different.

A few scattered thoughts after doing this for a year:

1. I think I got the rhythm of this thing now! Not gonna lie, I think it took me a spell to figure out exactly what Drezner’s World was going to me. Furthermore, I confess that every time someone describes this as a “newsletter” it doesn’t quite ring true to me. I still think of it as like an old-school blog. My point, however, is that I like the mixture of stuff I’m writing here, and like my old blogs, it still works as an intellectual sketchpad for ideas that might appear later in more polished form. I’m counting that as a win.

2. Thank you, subscribers and commenters! After just a year of doing this, I have more than 6,500 subscribers and nearly 400 paid subscribers. Thank you to everyone who is paying me for the privilege of reading everything I write. Part of me will always me amazed that anyone pays me to write anything. I mean, I got paid to write about The Bear and capitalism — that’s crazy! Going forward I’ll try to provide more content for the paying subscribers.¹ Thank you also to those who comment on the posts. By and large, that has worked out pretty well! Compared to my old blog 15 years ago, I spend much less time engaged in content moderation. Also, most of you have figured out the ground rulers on comments. I have had to kick out very few patrons at this establishment, and have felt zero need to call on Wade Garrett for backup.

3. I got lucky with my timing. Had I started Drezner’s World a month later it would not have succeeded as well as it has. While Twitter has not been a great source of traffic for most online outlets, it proved extremely useful for me when I was starting this newsletter. Elon Musk began his Chaos Muppet reign at Twitter six weeks after I launched Drezner’s World, eventually leading me and many others to drastically curtail our activity on that site. Twitter’s last six weeks as a media focal point proved very useful for me. Without it, I don’t know if Drezner’s World would have scaled up as well. The fragmentation of social media at present makes it seem like a far more daunting enterprise now.

4. I occasionally miss my copy-editors. Cracks about the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World aside, I liked having my stuff copy-edited when I was writing Spoiler Alerts for WaPo. More than one the Post’s copy-editing desk saved my bacon from making an incorrect or tactless statement. I’m working without a net here at Drezner’s World, and it’s worked so far. But I’m just a few dumb sentences away from Cancelvania. [What about me? You miss me, right?!—ed. Sure, and I might let you come out and play some more in the future.]

5. The money is good here! I was not particularly well-paid at WaPo, and they had the right of first refusal before I could submit work to other outlets. This past year, between my Substack revenue and what I have earned writing freelance for Vox, Politico, and Foreign Policy, I’m earning way more from my public writing than I did at WaPo. More income is good! Money can buy goods and services!

6. The exposure here is… less good. The advantage of writing at a place like the Washington Post is that as a mainstream media outlet what I wrote was often syndicated or picked up on other media outlets. I did a lot more radio and television hits during my years at the Post than I do for my Substack newsletter. This is a perfectly fine tradeoff, but it is a tradeoff. Sure, I like getting paid, but I really like being read!

7. Substack has some upsides. Substack’s user interface is way easier to use than my old Blogger software. Because Substack recruited me, I got a fair amount of help with the initial set-up. That probably helps explain the steady pickup of subscribers. Finally, I have had minimal need for tech support and the few times I have needed it they helped me debug the site with dispatch.

8. Substack also has some serious downsides. To put it bluntly, the stock photo library is for shit — especially for folks trying to write on a news peg. On occasion I’ve uploaded my own pictures, but it would be helpful if they had some newsy archives to draw on for trenchant pics. Finally, the owner-operators seem way too enamored with enabling and defending contributors that they think are offering heterodox views when they’re just offering racist views. As I said last month: “Hey, guys? Cut it out please!”

9. Here’s to another year! If you keep reading, I’ll keep writing!

1. In other words, if you haven’t become a paid subscriber yet, now would be an excellent time to do so.