The Fourth Estate

On heeding advice — or not.

Hello everyone,

I attended another how-to-write-a-newsletter panel this week featuring women authors and journalists. Much of the discussion focused on audience growth (this topic is everywhere!) because it seems like people either aren’t sure how to cut through all the noise or they feel apprehensive about starting one of these things (both relatable). I do wonder if we are getting into peak newsletter territory here, the same way the podcast market became a gold rush and threatened to oversaturated itself. But I hope newsletters are here to stay because they give us a portal into the people behind the stories, something I’ve been craving for a while as both a writer and a reader.

As my friends who work in legacy news orgs tell me, consumers want to hear from reporters, not from publications. There’s an industry shift to spotlight the journalists themselves. I came to this same realization after noticing that I wasn’t connecting to my audience the way I wanted. Who were the people reading my work? And did they feel they could talk to me? I’m often receiving emails after a story runs (some kind words and some not so much!) but I felt hidden.

For many years I was too nervous to speak publicly beyond the words in my articles. Because I had been commissioned by a publication, I figured I was to let them do the social media work, do the audience outreach, be the voice. I signed contracts and this seemed somehow binding. My Twitter profile, in particular, has always felt impersonal (honestly though, that’s a platform I have never been able to crack because I’ve never liked it that much).

Tulip season on Park Avenue!

Well! If you freelance in this industry long enough, you will realize that you want and need more autonomy. The authors on the panel, which was called “The New Fourth Estate: How Newsletters Are Reshaping Independent Media,” talked about the ways in which they’ve been able to serve their listeners or readers directly by bypassing outlets altogether. Some are breaking news. One conducted an experiential game for her audience.

I mentioned in a previous newsletter that someone at a party asked me whether I would make the jump to self-publishing my journalism work on here. At this point, I still see this newsletter as behind-the-scenes look rather than an original platform. I still like and need editors (and legal teams!). I’m also a traditionalist at heart and I get a little thrill whenever I open the glossies and the news pages and the literary journals — places I want to be. But the times they are a-changin’.

Spring is the best.

The panel, as these tend to be, was full of advice for launching and growing a newsletter (clicky headlines, scoops). But I’m a believer in ‘you do you’ and so I’ve learned to disregard advice that I don’t gel with.

I was told, at one point early in my career, that if I wanted to become a journalist then I needed to be tweeting all the time about whatever beat I wanted to cover. I was also informed that this beat should be tech because I’d previously worked in public relations on a Microsoft account. Tech was my expertise. And this tweet-about-your-expertise was some sort of prescription that had worked for other reporters. Well. I didn’t want to be a tech journalist. I wanted to be a generalist writing magazine stories. I wanted to cover the American West and rural areas, and to write about myself a little along the way. I did not tweet about technology. Instead I set out to do what I wanted.

So I’m always a bit wary about the need to mimic what’s “working” because I think we need to do what we want in this life. At the same time, I have honed my own expertise by reading the work of others, studying syntax and word choice, learning from the greats. How do we both listen and learn to filter at once?

Thanks for being here <3

Britta Lokting

Endnote:

• More friends publishing! Mark was in last weekend’s NYT Mag about wealthy entrepreneurs living in seapods. A new frontier.

• I continue to love all things Oxford American: this photo essay about a $1 house and small-town life, and this vignette about the help desk at Auburn University where people call with the most random questions in the world. So good.

• Also! I am looking for a graphic designer to make a little banner for the newsletter, preferably a student or someone looking to pick up extra work. Message me know if you know someone.