Welcome to Season 3 of The Art of Explaining Crime
Thanks for staying with me!
I structure the publication schedule into seasons and hiatuses because I need breaks. Chronic health issues limit the time I can spend on the newsletter to far less than I’d like. Last season, Season 2, I committed to producing daily posts and sometimes twice daily posts on publication weeks. This took a toll, and I could barely get a few newsletters out in the last couple weeks of the season.
This season, you have three changes coming up, all related to the fact that I’m committing to a “slow” approach to this newsletter.
Among other things, that means I’ll focus more on quality than quantity. It also means that I’ll be putting more thought into how quickly you actually need to know what research was published yesterday. My guess is that for most of you, finding out within a week or so of that research being published is soon enough. (If you’re one of the few who needs to know within a day or so, drop me a line.)
Now for the changes.
Crime Research Updates are free from the start
Last season, I did my best to publish paid Crime Research Updates every weekday, with the post unlocking three weeks later. This season, you will receive one huge Crime Research Update on Mondays with all of the previous week’s research. (This week’s will be out later today.) It should give you enough to last the rest of the week. These will be free to everyone from the moment of publishing.
Why once per week? I received some extremely valuable feedback and suggestions about post titles last season that made each CRU take longer to produce, at the expense of other projects. It was suggested that more people might click through if titles were specific to the post. (I had been focused on churning them out, so just I only gave default titles with dates to indicate new posts). I started highlighting a single study as an example of what readers would find behind the paywall and highlighting it in the titles. A seemingly simple workflow change added up over the course of each week because of how long it took to select and understand studies. Therefore, I’ll be doing fewer, larger updates. I decided on once per week.
Why free? Because I want these directories available to everyone and doing only one per week means it doesn’t take me as much work to produce them anymore.
Five Studies About schedule and content are changing
Last season, Five Studies About came out on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This season, there will still be two FSA posts, a free post on Tuesdays, and a paid, more in-depth, one on Wednesdays.
New series about criminology theory
Every other week, paid subscribers will get a newsletter about a current scientific theory of crime. Free subscribers will get to access the first part of each of these newsletters, but only paid subscribers will have access to the second part, where I detail recent research that puts that theory to the test.
Later this week, I’ll send a newsletter about what makes a theory scientific and how that differs from how “theory” gets used most of the time. Next week, I’ll send the first proper theory newsletter.
Again, welcome to Season 3!
Bravo! Some exciting changes and it looks really promising.