Programming note: Replacing Last Week's Crime Research
They're too long to be readable and take too much of my capacity to produce, so here's what we're going to do instead.
Putting together the Five Studies About and Crime Research Update (CRU) posts is more enjoyable than you might think.
Yes, they’re heavily templated tip sheets that don’t require much creativity. But there are other benefits.
Five Studies About posts, for example, require identifying potential patterns and selecting illustrative examples of patterns. CRU posts require monitoring new research and working closely with the code that does the initial sorting, which are both activities that I enjoy.
Last Week’s Crime Research, the weekly tip sheet that collects links to all the research shared in the previous week’s CRU posts, are a different story.
They have quickly become my most dreaded type of post to put together, even though it appears like doing that would be easy. Just recycle the CRU posts, right? Copy, paste, publish, done.
Not so simple when the idea was to produce a single, free directory each week for free subscribers. That means sorting all of last week’s studies again, and error-checking the directories again.
In the last few weeks, that’s meant doing all that for about 90 studies and often around 40 Google Word pages. That’s the pain on my side.
On your side, you get a directory that’s around 40 pages long each week.
That’s not manageable to read on a phone, which pushes anyone who wants to browse last week’s research for free to a larger screen.
I don’t think a single, free directory per week is valuable enough to warrant all this effort, on your part or on mine.
Once I got to this conclusion, “recycling” previous weeks’ CRU posts didn’t seem like such a bad idea, especially when I realized I could just set the paywall on each post to automatically lift after a week.
What’s happening
Two things:
Starting today, we’re going to try that out. I’ve just manually removed the paywall on the September 30 and October 2 CRU posts. I’ll do the same with the October 3 and 7 posts too. Today’s CRU will be set to automatically go free next Wednesday, and Substack will notify free subscribers by mail at that time. That’ll be what I do for all new CRU posts.
Last Week’s Crime Research is dicontinued, effective immediately. There will not be a new LWCR post this week. Free subscribers can see the newly unlocked posts linked in item 1 above. Old LWCR posts will remain available.
How this change benefits…
…free subscribers
By receiving CRU posts a week late, you’ll get smaller research directories, which will be easier to review.
You’ll also get relatively new research more often than you previously did.
…paid subscribers
I’ve always been bothered by the fact that Friday CRU posts are relatively less valuable that Monday and Wednesday posts, when compared to what free subscribers get. That is, the research in Friday posts became available to free subscribers in the free Last Week’s Crime Research faster than the previous two posts of the week. It might seem like a small thing, but by making this change, each post’s research becomes available to non-paying subscribers the same period of time after it does to you.
…everyone
By replacing Last Week’s Crime Research with automatic paywall lifting on CRU posts, I’ll be freed up to work on other kinds of posts.
I’ll add more information to this post if needed.
Let me know what you think of this idea in the comments:
It’s difficult to get the right mix and amount of information for each post. Takes some trial-and-error. Hopefully the new plan will work better for you, too.