Always. Be. Blogging. - by Nate Silver - Silver Bulletin

submited by

Style Pass

2024-11-24 12:30:02

With a staff of just two people, Silver Bulletin is now the #3 Substack newsletter in Substack’s largest category, U.S. Politics. We even briefly hit #2 during the election peak. That ranking is generous to us in various ways — it happens to use metrics that favor us 1 . Also, it’s likely to fall. (Unlike most Substacks, our traffic is highly seasonal/cyclical.) Still, it’s something we’re proud of. Even with some inevitable churn … let’s be honest, probably a lot of churn … it gives us a great base to grow from as we plan for the future and consider expansion opportunities. This year went way better than I expected, and I sincerely appreciate your support.

Although we’re best known for our models — the election model and the NCAA Tournament model and more sports models to return soon — about half of our paid subscriptions and two-thirds of overall subscriptions are generated by our articles, a.k.a. newsletters, a.k.a. blog posts. So, I wanted to share a few words about those. I basically started out digital life as a blogger 2 — FiveThirtyEight.com spun out of pseudonymous blog posts I wrote at Daily Kos 3 — so it’s a natural format for me.

What’s the difference between an article, a newsletter, and a blog post? Admittedly, the distinctions are subtle. An “article” implies a higher level of refinement, ideally with a crisp, newsworthy takeaway. A “newsletter” suggests something almost diary-like that is updated regularly. A “blog” post, in my view, is mostly a stylistic characterization. Blogs are defined by their spikiness. They are sharp-elbowed — kiki, not bouba — sometimes straddling the boundary between analysis and opinion and presenting a strong authorial point of view.