Ownership is the critical point here. Ownership in email in the same way we own a paperback: We recognize that we (largely) control the email subscriber lists, they are portable, they are not governed by unknowable algorithmic timelines.3 And this isn’t ownership yoked to a company or piece of software operating on quarterly horizon, or even multi-year horizon, but rather to a half-century horizon. Email is a (the only?) networked publishing technology with both widespread, near universal adoption,4 and history. It is, as they say, proven.

The best way to read the newsletter is to skim through, try a few links and put it down. The next time you're doom-scrolling, go into your email and pick it back up. Try some of the links you didn't try the first time, even if you're not sure you'll like them.

The amount of work is the same no matter whether you've got ten subscribers or 10,000. It doesn't matter how many are reading it, the work is still the same, and that's a really valuable thing for writers.

Newsletter businesses are by no means new: Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness empire, started as a newsletter back in 2008; Morning Brew, which launched in 2015, now brings in more than $20million in revenue.Business analysts such as Ben Thompson of Stratechery and Bill Bishop of Sinocism have built substantial readerships around their insightful takes on business news, and reportedly earn their creators six figure salaries. Now, thanks to subscription services (Substack, Revue, Ghost) and patronage platforms (Patreon, Ko-Fi) it’s easier than ever for writers to forgo traditional publications and monetise their own writing directly.

Newsletter platforms are attracting big names: Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, New York Magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan and Buzzfeed’s Anne Helen Petersen have all recently quit high profile publishers to launch publications on Substack.

But I actually think stock and flow is a useful metaphor for media in the 21st century. Here’s what I mean: Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.