Saving Local News, Anthony Smith's case, and Carbon-Capture Tiptoeing into Environmental Justice
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Hi everybody.
I donāt know about you but I am definitely feeling burnt out this month. Good thing I have a nice, relaxing, holiday vacation with friends and family to look forward to (ha ha, just kidding.)
Before I share some of my new work I had a quick question. I think people who read this newsletter range from āvery onlineā toā¦have a healthy relationship with the internet, and so you may or may not know that there are a lot of journalists of late who have created their own Substack newsletters, some have even left their full-time jobs to focus primarily on them. (Iām not really clear on the details of this stuff but my understanding is Substack approaches famous-ish writers, offers them some package of incentives to get them to leave their jobs, like maybe health insurance stipends and free editing services, and then these journalists with large followings agree to try it out, often with steep paywall rates. Some maybe need a break from their bosses, or feel like it could offer a better creative outlet. I donāt know.) Anyway, the point is there is a new influx of newsletters, and some of them are very thoughtful and well-written! You may have picked this up ha ha but I do not have an editor. (If you are reading this want to be my editor???? let me know.)
That wasnāt my question though. I created this in March 2018 as a vehicle to 1) distribute my freelance reporting and 2) to help subsidize some of the journalism I think is important but harder to justify doing economically. My goal was always to make it free in service of goal #1, and I figured most people who were generous enough to support my work with money were not the types of people who wanted me to write stuff inaccessible to the broader public. Thereās a lot of paywalled journalism these days, and while I think people who can afford to pay for journalism absolutely should, a lot of people canāt. And so in media weāre all trying to figure out how to navigate this in a way thatās most equitable and sustainable.
Basically, since I donāt make my living primarily from this newsletter, I have operated with the idea that in order to reach my two aforementioned goals, I shouldnāt spend too long working on this, instead of doing more journalism, which is also how I can earn money and keep this always free. So I have generally not included some of the extra things other writers have in their newsletters, like longish personal thoughts, previously unpublished work, internet reading recommendations, stuff like that. (Thatās all stuff I generally tweet about, though.) I also get stressed about writing long things that are unedited. Moreover, and this is what I want to know from you, I also write this with the assumption that people do not have the energy to read long newsletters. Speaking for myself, I donāt. I subscribe to a bunch and I just donāt have the bandwidth to finish many of them. Thatās probably partially COVID-19 related, itās hard exactly to say what our reading habits would be like in normal times, although I do feel like the burden of reading emails was a problem long before 2020, and I never want this to feel like I am creating more work for people. I want it to be a place where if you interested or curious about my reporting, or want to support it, you can have an easy way to keep up on it, with links + short summaries to your inbox.
Can you please let me know, either in the public comments or by email (rmc031@gmail.com) if any of these operating assumptions are actually true? Do you generally prefer short newsletters? Do you think this would be worth paying for if I included bells and whistles, or if it came out more often? Are there things you wish you saw more of in this?
I donāt really have the bandwidth right now to make any big changes (see above, about burnout) but I am grateful to all of you for your readership and I am doing some thinking this month about how to make this newsletter most worth our while in the new year, and Iād appreciate any feedback you might have.
Now very quickly:
I have three new stories to share.
In New Republic I have a reported essay about local news, where I make the argument that ultimately we should think about it similarly to how we think about universal mail delivery. Back in the summer, when the nation was panicking over Louis DeJoy and the possibility of a privatized mail system, people instinctively recognized that relying on UPS, Fedex and Amazon alone would mean some communitiesāmost likely living in rural and/or low-income areasāwould simply suffer and lose out. It felt like a real threat to a core American idea, that all citizens deserve access to the mail and our government should make that possible. While this wasnāt the case for 200 years, itās now pretty clear that relying on the market alone, and/or the charitable whims of billionaires, is also not a sustainable solution for ensuring all communities have access to local journalism. If you think reporting is a public good, which I do, and which the Founding Fathers did for this whole democracy thing, then we should actually treat it as such. You can read that here.
At The Intercept I have a new piece about some interesting developments in the world of climate politics. Carbon-capture technology ā which can refer both to tech that captures CO2 formed during power generation and industrial processes and then stores it so itās not emitted into the atmosphere, and so-called direct-air capture, which is tech that sucks already emitted carbon dioxide out of the air ā is increasingly viewed as a key part of how weāre going to meet global climate targets by mid-century. But carbon-capture tech has been opposed by some influential progressive climate groups and this past September, 18 Democrats, including AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley voted against a clean energy package that passed the House, largely because it included provisions for carbon-capture.
Last year I had a long piece about some of the tensions around carbon-capture and the left and I wanted to follow-up on that, looking at how the carbon-capture movement was thinking ahead to the Biden administration. (Biden, for his part, campaigned in strong support of the technology.) While doing the reporting, I learned that the carbon-capture movement itself has been going through a reckoning over the last year, trying to figure out how to center justice and equity more into their work, even as many environmental justice groups still view them with great suspicion. You can read that story here.And lastly at The Appeal I have a story about Anthony Smith, a 29-year-old teacher and social justice leader in Philadelphia who was arrested on federal charges in late October for allegedly aiding the destruction of a police car during racial justice protests back in May. Smithās case is one of nearly 300 nationwide brought by federal prosecutors against protesters over the last six months and many activists see the charges as politically motivated. I wrote about his case, and whether these kinds of charges might be dropped under a Biden admin.
Thanks for reading. My last post was about a special collaborationĀ I worked on between The Intercept and The American Prospect, about encouraging Congress to be more proactive and strategic about statutory overrides, which are federal laws that can challenge U.S Supreme Court decisions. (The most well-known one of the 21st century is probably the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which was the first law Barack Obama signed as president and addressed a 2007 decision.)
The piece was online in late November and now itās out in print in The American Prospect. I think it looks great :ā)
Thank you! For reading and supporting this work.
Saving Local News, Anthony Smith's case, and Carbon-Capture Tiptoeing into Environmental Justice
I like it as is. (but I am a total freeloader)
Short newsletters > long newsletters
Browsability (to find the 1 of X articles you wrote recently Iām most interested in) is good.
Infrequent, sporadic > frequent, predictable
(And Iāll subscribe for money now and stop freeloading.)
Thanks for shining a light, Rachel!