A LEADING QUESTION

We are occasionally asked why we link to scientific journals, news outlets, and sometimes even opinion pieces that are behind paywalls.

In a world where HBO HBO Max Max and Spotify and everyone else raise prices once a month, it’s a great question:

Our newsletter is free — why the hell do we make you click through to something that costs money?

Is that prohibitive? Disingenuous? Does it create too much friction? Does providing — in our free newsletter — a brief synopsis of an otherwise paywalled article or post or whatever take away from that publication’s ability to make money off of their work?

Does that brief synopsis do remotely enough work to explain what otherwise required 500-5000 words from an actual journalist or expert in their field? How could it?

Are we even qualified to write that synopsis?

Maybe?

First off, we don’t make you click through to anything. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

Since the beginning, I have wrestled with not only what news to cover, but from which publications and journalists. How much opinion to include (vs straight reporting, data journalism, or peer-reviewed journals), and especially ones that challenge my priors. I have swung dramatically back and forth on exactly how much context to provide for each news item — from barely any and a clickbait-headline to a couple hundred words each.

We have been on quite the journey together.

Today, in Willow’s excellent hands (thank god/you’re welcome), the synopsis for each news item is closer to “just enough context that you, an extremely busy human who trusted us with your email address, don’t need to click through. But not enough to essentially “save you a click” and rob that publication of the fruits of their labor, and of course, to forsake you, a curious Shit Giver, the opportunity to go much deeper.”

You see, we care deeply about your desire to both go deeper and wider on what’s happening today, how we got here, and what it could mean for tomorrow.

To that end, we built Vibe Check, our extremely popular Members-only news dashboard, so you can read everything we’re reading (or pick and choose, filter by category, etc).

But even in the free Monday newsletter or essays, people who (can afford to) click through to the publications we cite and trust the most are able to dive far deeper into a category or even sub-category, like maternal health or clinical trials.

Like I said, I’ve been wrestling with this for a long time, and while having Willow on board and running the main newsletter has been indescribably helpful, it’s still not easier.

And that’s because — as you may or may not have heard, and for a variety of semi-villainous reasons — the very newsrooms we stand on the shoulders of are very, very close to disappearing.

And that’s very, very bad.

The current state of journalism is not great, Bob.

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