Tell me how you really feel
And by that I mean: please fill out my survey.
No science this week. Sorry about that — I was planning something on artificial life, but real life ended up getting in the way.
So instead, I have a few announcements, a change, and a request for feedback.
The next 4 months will be weird in a good way
Starting next week, I'm going to be in Vienna for a 4-month science journalism residency at the Complexity Science Hub. A residency is basically a program that funds a journalist (or artist, or writer, etc.) to take time away from their normal professional life to hang out somewhere interesting and work on projects, learn things, and otherwise develop in ways that wouldn't usually be possible. During this time, I won't be working normally. Instead of pitching and writing science news, I'll be focusing on several projects including: just learning stuff (always good), a short podcast series on novelty, maybe a book proposal if I'm ambitious, and... this newsletter!
Complexity Science Hub
Change is always an opportunity, and I want to take this opportunity to improve the newsletter. For that, I need your help.
I'd be super grateful if you'd fill it out. It should only take 5 minutes (unless you want to go wild in the "anything else" box), and the more people fill it out the better I can make this place in the future.
Try stuff, keep what works, ditch the rest
I'll be honest with you: one reason I want to grow this newsletter is because I'm afraid. I'm afraid of where science journalism is heading. I'm lucky to write for publications that pay well. But an anchor client just cut their rate — I'm now earning $100 less per story for them than I did as a rookie 3 years ago, despite inflation — and one of the best-paying magazines I write for recently told me that they're also cutting rates down. The "competitive" per-word rate of $1/word hasn't budged in literally decades. And science magazines are shutting down because the science philanthropists who fund them are redirecting funds to research because of the Trump administration keeps swinging wrecking balls at science funding.
Add generative AI into the mix and... I don't feel like I need to elaborate.
That's all to say that building my own audience feels like the only sustainable path forward in the long-term. I know that people still have an appetite for science, even if they might be losing their taste for legacy magazines and traditional science journalism. So instead of only cooking the old menu, I want to try opening up my own little food cart. That's this newsletter. My hope is that it — or whatever it becomes — can grow into something that brings enough people enough value that I can keep on doing this science communication thing.
Doing that means being a bit more agile. It took me 6 months to get to about 100 subscribers. I can do better. I want to use the residency to experiment more, keep what works, and ditch the rest instead of clinging to it for months.
This process will work better and produce results you, personally, are happier with if you give me feedback. So yeah, please fill out that survey.
This brings me to my next point...
No more paper roundups — at least not in their current form
Yeah, paper roundups didn't work the way I wanted them to.
At first, when roundups were still monthly, I wanted them to be an "easy" post format to give myself a pseudo-break once a month. That didn't work out. Hilariously, roundups ended up taking me more time than other posts. So then I switched them up: they transformed into a way-shorter weekly roundup with a full version just for paid subscribers. The idea was to 1) post more regularly, 2) to eliminate the time-intensive monthly format, and 3) to give people a reason to become paid subscribers.
Well, that did not work out at all. Literally nobody upgraded since I made that change! So: it's time to ditch that and move on.
For context, my very early subscriber data hinted that paper roundups might be the reason people were reading this newsletter at all. I got most of my new signups from paper roundup posts for a while (that has since really, really changed). So I figured roundups might be the most valuable thing to readers, and hoped that by making them more frequent I could provide the kind of value people would pay for. Clearly I figured wrong.
Still, I love human curation and I love digging through papers. So I'd love to make paper roundups work — I suspect that if I stuck to a narrower topic, like exoplanet science, they might work better.
So if you liked (or didn't like) roundups, please fill out my survey to let me know and share your ideas.
Guest posts from aspiring science writers
Finally, one more change you're going to see around here. Occasionally, I'm going to feature guest posts from aspiring science writers.
To start science writing, you need "clips" — published work samples. But wait, you might ask: if you need clips to start writing, how do you get clips? Exactly.
I'm still very early in my career myself. But I'm reaching a point, I've realized, where I actually can mentor people taking the first steps into this job: getting clips, pitching their first stories, etc. So I'm starting to do that more where I can. And I have this little platform here, so I want to use it to occasionally elevate the voices of aspiring science writers. You can expect the first guest post soon!
If you or someone you know is an aspiring science writer who would benefit from a few Zoom calls of mentorship plus a chance to get a published clip here on my humble newsletter, just reach out. If I have bandwidth, I'd love to help.
Thanks for reading. No really.
Seriously, thank you. It's been so fun working on this project, and I do feel like it is starting to get a bit of momentum! People, including writers I respect, share essays from time to time on Bluesky (and even in their own newsletters!), and folks do keep signing up. Most surprising, I am actually posting every week — which with my tangled yarn ball of a brain feels like a serious accomplishment.
I hope that by making some changes, being a bit more experimental and adventurous, and responding to feedback I can make this place even more worthwhile for you. It's super cheesy, but we all have limited time on this Earth and I'm so genuinely grateful for every one of you that decides to spend a bit of it on my writing.
(Also, fill out the survey)