Writing for outlets isn't worth it anymore

Why write essays online like this? The truth is most people wake up and the first thing they do is look at their phone and read. What they read is not a book. Neither fiction nor nonfiction tomes, nor poetry nor autobiography, no, nothing like that at all. They’ll read social media posts, they’ll read news articles, their emails, sports summaries, ... See more

The amount of work it takes to actually get something published vastly outstrips that of writing it. This iron law of freelance writing is indubitable and unchangeable. You don’t just have to write a piece, you also have to pitch it. This involves all sorts of contortions and self-promotion and nudging and mildly stalkerish behavior. I had the most... See more

The problem for blogs was always search, audience capture, monetization, and the impulse to blather about nothing. I think the transition of essays out of blogs and into newsletters effectively solved these problems, since now the incentives incline more toward quality rather than quantity.

Times are changing for writers. There’s been a recent wave who’ve stopped contributing to outlets and moved to newsletters like this, such as myself. To give some insight into what’s happening, the following is a postmortem of my decade-long career writing nonfiction for well-known media outlets like The Atlantic or The Daily Beast.