It took me almost four months after leaving my job to actually start this newsletter. I’ve spent weeks staring at the Substack CMS trying to decide what weird fact, preferably semi-sex related to kick things off with. After all, I kept reminding myself, the Point of this newsletter is to get people excited about that book I wrote, or maybe to drive people to my podcast or my TikTok, both of which feed back into the ultimate goal of having A Brand that makes publishers want to publish My Work.
I’ve spent the last decade telling myself that I’m working on My Brand: Enfant terrible of science writing, Queen of Uranus puns in legacy pubs, faster than anyone better and better than anyone faster. I built the Twitter following and giggled at the death threats and figured out which Men in Media wanted me to act like their granddaughter and which wanted me to act like I might sleep with them (and which of them wanted both).
Now, burned out and chronically ill, it’s not the hustling or the content-making or the stealth-self-marketing I regret; it’s the fact that none of it was ever really for me, and I never really believed it should be.
When I worked at a certain national newspaper, a certain editor who was the subject of a certain Oscar-winning film tried to talk me out of taking another job by telling me that he saw young reporters like me all the time. He saw us think we were reaching a huge audience on our own. He saw us think we could carry that audience with us and take it somewhere new. He saw us ignore the fact that “the platform” is what got us all the attention. When he told me this, I already believed it to be true.
I look back now and see a dusty and crumbling institution that relentlessly jammed its blood funnel into anything that smelled like youth and relevance, guzzling down the social capital of bright young things made to believe we were the lucky ones.
I have had some incredible jobs. I have worked with and for some amazing people. I’ve done things I’m immensely proud of. I don’t own any of it. I had no control over the marketing of my book, I have no control over the future of the popular podcast I created, I have no control over how many layers of paywall go up in front of articles I wrote to help people navigate herpes or PTSD or making their own bath bombs.
I promise this newsletter won’t be full of self-indulgent reflections on Why I Left Media. Honestly, I don’t intend to ever bring it up again. This newsletter is going to be what you’d expect Rachel Feltman’s newsletter to be: Mostly weird facts, sometimes about sex, often about science, usually about history. I might share some particularly cool or unusual bit of science-adjacent news I’ve heard. I might update you on podcast goings-on or talk about the process of writing my next book or give you a little pep talk on healing from trauma. I’ll recommend things I’ve enjoyed reading and watching and listening to. I’ll share old work of mine that I’m revisiting. I’ll remind you that you can hire me to do editorial consulting for your brand. I’ll keep promising I’m going to share some of my fiction writing soon. I’ll try and fail not to opine.
But this newsletter will not be a perfectly honed brand-building tool designed to make me more marketable to a publisher or to drive traffic to something or other. This newsletter will be an exercise in believing that it wasn’t the platform. I have spent the last decade proving to newsrooms that people enjoy my work and value what I have to say. I intend to spend the next decade proving it to myself.