You may be familiar with Timothy B. Lee’s work from The Washington Post, Vox or Ars Technica — he worked at all three. Today Tim is a Substack author well into his second year of “Understanding AI,” a fast-rising analytical newsletter on the hottest topic around.
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We recently upgraded this cheat sheet to 19 newsletters, all with contact info. We tried to avoid the roll-up newsletters that point to others’ content but offer little of their own. There are a couple in there. Then again, those “digest” newsletters point to still more resources.
Though there are many more out there, this cheat sheet lists only seven Substack healthcare newsletters. We omitted the ones whose authors publish infrequently, and those that just don’t seem worth your time. Below are the ones “closest to useful.”
One year ago we fielded eight predictions for 2021. How did we do? Not great, honestly. Let’s look at each.
All year long we’ve read about editors planting their flag in Substack. Rare is the story about someone leaving it. That’s what Jacob Donnelly is doing. Jacob believes he has outgrown Substack, explaining in a Dec. 15 post that the platform is too rigid and prevents him from growing his business.
Here’s our latest list of Substack newsletters on cloud, security and fintech topics.
Newsletter Spy is a new tool that searches Substack for newsletter authors and topics. It’s exactly what the media-curious have been waiting for, since Substack itself provides little in the way of discovery. Prepare for disappointment.
In trendy and media trade media at least, the Substack-as-new-model-for-journalism story seems to have already come and gone. Yet there’s so much more left to tell. Perhaps the Substack story’s next phase is best told inside out, through the eyes of a newly self-minted author — such as James Ledbetter.
Add Substack to the list of platforms frustrating to PR — Product Hunt, Stack Overflow, Reddit, Quora — that command attention but aren’t pitchable like publications. Founded in 2017, Substack is a publishing platform for indie newsletter authors. It’s cool and we’ll get into why, but Substack’s web site is more or less a metaphorical black box.
YOUR ACCOUNT
FRIDGE NOTES
Well, for now it’s Jim Jordan… but such news illustrates the kind of world we seem to be headed for. Adweek has the details, subscription required.
No “predictions” post will appear on this site. That said, quite a number of subscribers have asked for a Zoom/MS Teams presentation on what 2025 will bring. A conversation is precisely the right tool for the job. After the election — and with AI transforming publishing and life — “2025” is best discussed among peers, not predicted. So if you’d like to have a confidential group exchange on what stands to unfold, and why, and how comms pros can come out on top in spite of it all, drop a line and we shall schedule something.
According to Adweek, Omnicom CEO John Wren and IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky were in merger talks for eleven and a half months before the transaction was announced this week. Amazing that it didn’t leak.
Should PR pros stop visiting X, with all its lies and hate? It’s only going to get worse. Or are tidbits from targets too important to walk away from? Click here to watch tech edit vet David Strom and I disagree (at high speed) about this, as one compelling visual after another pops up on your screen. In 2025, SWMS will officially launch “SWMS Sound Thinking,” designed to be “argumentative insight in six minutes or less.” Each segment will explore a timely and controversial topic of interest to tech comms pros. This prototype runs 5:25. Hope you enjoy it — feedback vital and welcome! –Sam
New EIC Jamie Heller has asked her reporters to start going on camera — for the BI TikTok channel — to explain the big, deep-divey story they just published. Other publications do this — especially archival Fortune. BI is now on that too. Game on.
At this time last year, Eric Newcomer and his two podcast co-hosts — Max Child and James Wilsterman — each formed an “AI startup fantasy team” and picked five AI startups to seed their rosters. We’re now in year 2 and it’s time to draft again. The podcasters wonder… which startups do they dump? Which do they add? The player whose startups accumulate the most total value by Nov. 1, 2028 is the winner, so there’s plenty of time to make adjustments. Here’s a link to the AI fantasy team podcast — you may need a password. Not sure.
