A slight change: shorter posts, more often

Overthinking the sports business, for money

Five years on, and time for a bit of a change

It’s our fifth birthday party this evening.

No speeches.

But from here on there’ll be a slight change in how we do things.

For the last few years, we’ve delivered a weekly full fat newsletter to your door every Thursday.

From here on in, I’ll post shorter pieces more frequently.

The reason for this shift is not particularly strategic.

It’s not driven by engagement metrics or some smart data led insight.

The opposite in fact.

It’s a feeling I’ve noticed.

An absence.

A few of you will recall that Unofficial Partner began life (1.0) as a blog, back in the noughties, before the social platforms centralised our attention.

In 2008, I devoured Andrew Sullivan’s epic Why I Blog, and jumped in.

Over the subsequent years of podcasting, tweeting and newsletter writing, nothing has quite filled the space once occupied by the blog format.

I really miss it.

To many this will sound overly nostalgic, or pretentious, or wilfully contrarian; a zig to Substack’s zag.

It’s not that. Blogging was always about more than format.

It’s to do with energy.

I’ve found myself warehousing stuff for Thursday.

That idea from Tuesday morning quickly goes off, like a Lidl peach.

The illusion of completeness

Writing on the internet rewards brevity and immediacy.

That’s the whole point of it.

By contrast, newsletters feel more like writing newspaper or magazine articles.

To fit the form, you have to exaggerate an idea’s importance to justify its place; a small thought is stretched to 500 or so words, to appear ‘newsletter-worthy’.

That’s great if the idea deserves the space. Go ahead, write long.

But don’t write long to fill the space. Or just because it’s Thursday.

Blogging was/is different.

It’s a moving thing.

The thought is never finished. Each post is a glimpse of the whole. A shard.

This gives the author a platform to change their mind, in public.

Rather than a weakness - the dreaded accusation of inconsistency - we’re liberated to flag up our mistakes and errors, or to revisit that thing you wrote one hungover morning that was just plain wrong.

In this way, blogging is a more honest medium.

I really like the following passage, particularly the phrase ‘fewer pretensions to authority’.

Andrew Sullivan: A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.

It’s really easy to fall in to the Thought Leader Trap by trying to sound cleverer than you are.

The omission of a link here.

A nicked idea there.

We all do it.

But the platforms have incentivised us to plagiarise at scale, to take someone else’s work and re-present it - chop it up in to a Twitter thread for example - and slyly take the credit.

Blogging comes from a more generous starting point.

It’s about having the confidence to think aloud and encourage others to join in.

Sharing interesting things; I saw this and thought you’d like it, etc.

So, you might find an UP email in your inbox next Thursday as per usual.

Or Monday.

Either way, it’ll be good. Don’t worry.