Media in Flux, Even at Smart Mouth
I started this newsletter about three years ago with a rather starry-eyed premise: I could hire freelance journalists from around the world, and pay them well, and run this by myself while also doing all my other work, and funding would eventually be found, in some mix of subscribers and advertisers and probably things I hadn’t thought of.
I’m a very silly goose!
I often say I’m among the last of the old-school journalists, which has many implications, most pertinently here that I was always actively discouraged from knowing anything about the business side of publishing. I’m finally getting that education now, and truly, better late than never! I realized that being stuck in a place where you don’t earn enough income to make the product better, so you can’t make the product better to earn more income, doesn’t serve me or the audience. So I’m scrapping the old Smart Mouth newsletter and starting over again.
Will the new version indeed be a better product? That’s subjective! But, if you squint hard enough, you can see that one upside to the absolute disaster that is contemporary journalism is that we are all completely free to experiment right now. In the rare moments when my brain isn’t determined to scream at me about what a worthless sack I am, I recognize that I’m lucky to be able to switch directions, and that any “mistake” is an opportunity to improve the work.
Going forward Smart Mouth will mostly be written by me. (Hi, I’m Katherine, I’ve written some pieces here but mostly just the newsletter intros.) The focus will remain on food and history, but I’m going to play around with formats. I’ve got some mini-essays planned as well as a long-form serial that I’m excited about and terrified of.
And per earlier notes, I am making moves to leave Substack. It will be awhile, for all the standard boring reasons.
(I'm on Venmo and PayPal, if you’re inclined to contribute without Substack getting a cut. My LLC is called TableCakes, which I think is very cute.)
Thank you all for being here. I hope you continue to be here as I turn this into something more personal. I appreciate you!
I think in business they call it 'iterating'
