Newsletter name change, and other announcements
We’ll cover the following in this post:
I changed the newsletter’s name
Brief aside: Why only directories lately?
I’m launching a second newsletter
“Season 1” of The Art of Explaining Crime starts Monday, and what that means
Let’s get right to it.
I changed the newsletter’s name
Names are important. They identify the named entity and differentiate it from other entities. They set expectations. They reflect mandates of companies, products, newsletters...
They can even change mandates. Or threaten to.
Those of you who have seen anything from this newsletter in the last 24 hours or so may have noticed that its name changed.
It went from Explaining Crime…
… to The Art of Explaining Crime.
Why?
A month or so back, I realized that Explaining Crime’s meaning was ambiguous and could be interpreted in (at least) two ways:
My intended interpretation, which focuses on the “explaining” of crime. That is, it means focusing on the actual doing of “explaining crime,” the actual resources, actions, skills, and execution of explaining crime to someone else, with an emphasis on that someone else being an audience of some sort.
The obvious interpretation, one that anyone unfamiliar with the newsletter might assume the newsletter was about based solely on its name: ongoing explanations of crime in all its forms.
I like clarity. Realizing that potential readers might get confused when they learned what the newsletter is about bothered me. A lot.
Thinking about this led to questioning whether I should change my content strategy to include explanations of crime. The jury’s still out on that. I think that kind of content would be valuable, but was and am worried about time and with cannibalizing a stalled project that focuses on that kind of content. (Would love to hear what you think on whether to start including explanations of crime:)
Brief aside: Why only directories lately?
My big focus on the newsletter recently has been two kinds of tip sheets: curations of new and recent crime research (Your First Five) and aggregations of new research in the form of directories (Crime Research Updates). These tip sheets are resources for people who explain crime, who (I believe), need regular access to new crime research in order to inform their explanations. In a planned upgrade/soft reboot of the newsletter, I plan to move beyond just tip sheets. More on that below.
I decided to stay the course with my content strategy for now. But the name still bothered me. I looked around at what other people had named their Substacks, looked to naming conventions outside of Substack (newspapers, magazines, books, etc.), and put some thought into various naming approaches.
That’s how I settled on The Art of Explaining Crime.1 It’s more like what you’d see on the cover of books than the average Substack, but once I tried adding “The Art of” to the original name, it was like something clicked into place.
“That’s it. That clarifies everything,” I thought.
So here we are.
I’m launching a second newsletter
That stalled project I mentioned is a publication on Medium called Understanding Crime. It covered crime research from a more journalistic frame. I’ve been wanting to start publishing that again, but have had reservations about Medium after working with Substack for Explaining Crime this year. Also, the behind-the-scenes setup work of the tip sheets mentioned above has taken up most of the time time I had allotted for writing projects.
Will I still have enough time for The Art of Explaining Crime? Yes. The behind-the-scenes set up is “done”, so as long as nothing goes wrong with it, I don’t intend to touch it again until the end of “Season 1”, which will be the end of the year. That leaves me time for The Art of Explaining Crime and other projects I’m working on.
What’s the new newsletter about? Crime. (I know.) I’m actually bringing Understanding Crime to Substack in this newsletter, which is called The Practice of Understanding Crime. You should go subscribe:
“Season 1” of The Art of Explaining Crime starts Monday, and what that means
In addition to clarity, I like cycles. It comes from my formative years in university and at my campus newspaper, which followed the uni’s three-semester system that divides the year into three four-month periods:
Fall semester (September to December)
Winter semester (January to April)
Spring semester (May to August)
I also like the idea of “seasons” of a media product, especially the podcasts where podcasters take a “break” between seasons.
Contrast this to the model of a 24-hour news network or daily newspaper or nightly newscast or weekly magazine where there’s no discernable break for the audience. Content just gets turned out at a constant pace with new events filling old templates.
I find the second approach exhausting.
I’m trying out a season-based approach with The Art of Explaining Crime, with the first season beginning Monday and ending with the end of the year.
Watch this space to see what I have planned.
Thanks to
and her excellent and well-named for the moment the penny dropped.
Wow -- I'm glad you were inspired!