Newsletters are a visual medium
An outtake and afterthought with Francis Zierer
Welcome to Human Pursuits, the column that features need-to-know names and stories in media and other creative spaces. Today, an outtake from my conversation with Creator Spotlight editor and Tasteland co-host Francis Zierer.
Read part one of our conversation here.
Outtake
ES: Creator Spotlight has a recurring segment called “Steal This Tactic”. Between your two media properties, what’s one approach that Human Pursuits readers should be stealing?
FZ: This is the great problem with how I’ve been operating. For so long, I was the one writing every newsletter. I would write every “Steal This Tactic,” but I wouldn't have time to apply any of them. Now I have an assistant editor in the excellent Natalia Pérez-Gonzalez, and so I have more time to think about it and try to apply the knowledge that I’m learning from these success stories.
My approach to storytelling in Creator Spotlight is… I try to think of writing and the way we structure our writing, as bones and muscle. The bones are what give a newsletter its structure. It's the core. The muscles are what allow it to move; they’re what's kind of layered on top of it.
The bones of Creator Spotlight are that it has to be educational. People have to be able to learn from it. They’re looking for tactics and transparency. “This is how this person grew their audience from 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers”. But the muscle is who they are and what their motivations are. And there’s more muscle than there are bones, right?
In terms of concrete advice, I would say strict word counts. Right now, the Creator Spotlight newsletter is capped at below 2,000 words. It’s like that old idea that it takes as long to make something as you give yourself to do it. I could have a year to write an essay, or one week. I’m going to write about the same thing but with a different texture. I think word counts are an important way of enforcing structure and consistency.
ES: Agree to disagree. Laughs. No, I’m kidding. I don’t personally do word counts, but that’s because I’m a freak who uses Substack’s estimated read-time to gauge whether something is too long. Like, my interviews cannot take more than 10 minutes to read, because that’s too much time. But I’m not agonizing over exact word counts.
FZ: Interesting. I’ve never understood the reading time metric. It’s so inflated.
ES: Oh, it’s fake for sure. But I think length is only one part of the equation. Creator Spotlight does a good job of breaking things up into little chunks, and I try to do that with Human Pursuits, too. I like having my little recurring segments and a lot of pictures and quotes. I want the text to have a pace, even though everything is static. It sucks to read something on desktop or on your phone, and see a wall of text. I want things to feel like they’re moving along.
FZ: This actually leads me to a better tactic, which I got from Ernie Smith. I interviewed him a year ago. He said, “A newsletter is a visual medium.” I had never heard it articulated so directly. So the way I think of things is texture. Newsletters need texture… I do a scroll test. If there are no quote blocks or images that catch my eye, we’ve done a bad job of creating texture.
Afterthought
Everybody has a newsletter, it seems, and yet nobody really knows what they’re doing. The medium is still too fresh, too primordial. It’s a flan that’s still cooking in the oven. You want to flip it, but it needs more time.
Nothing is set, in other words. Nobody has cracked the code, for instance, on how to attract new readers. Is it with hyper-saturated thumbnails à la YouTube? A successful Note à la Twitter? AI-generated content like what you find on LinkedIn?
Substack swears by the recommendation flywheel, and I have found some success there (shout out for the recent nod). But Human Pursuits has always been a newsletter by the people, for the people, and featuring the people. Most of my growth still reflects that. This whole thing is basically fuelled by word of mouth and my own delusions.
It’s one thing to attract new readers and another to keep them, though. Texture can give them something to hold on to. Francis suggests images and quotes. But increasingly, I think, people want to feel a human on the other side of the screen. Even if it means the finished product is a little hairy or imperfect.
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Everybody’s favourite super producer, Jack Antonoff, says he likes to hear people struggling with the machine. It’s why the ARP synthesizer on “Please, Please, Please” is slightly off-kilter compared to the drums. It’s a scuff mark on the linoleum floor of perfection. A powerful muscle that helps the song to move.