When muckraking New York newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer died in 1911, he left a $2 million endowment to Columbia University. To this day, Pulitzer’s name is best known for the resulting Pulitzer Prizes, given each year in multiple categories by the university.
This year, This is True was under consideration for the Prize in three categories.
An academic’s “history” of “Florida Man” makes some startling — and completely wrong! — claims about how the “Florida Man meme” got started online. No, it wasn’t in 2012, or even the “mid-2000s”!
I’ve Always Liked the “Inside” Stories — What It’s Like to… Save a Life. Be a Surgeon. Pave a Road.
In This Episode: Sure, it’s cool to hear stories of famous (and completely obscure) people who exhibit Uncommon Sense. But there’s one other thing you need to know about every one of them: they’re definitely not perfect, and that’s important to know because neither are you.
True has had a presence on Patreon for a few years now. Patreon is one of several sites that helps “creators” get support from patrons. In late 2017, Patreon made a bone-headed decision that resulted in well over half of True’s patrons bailing, mostly for my own home-rolled alternative. The downside of both: having to create yet another “account” on yet another site. At least using my shopping cart there’s no 5 percent fee scraped off the top for Patreon.
Looking at the stats for 2019 is showing what you all found the most interesting or entertaining to read (and listen to!) of my offerings this year.
Announcing a New True Book Series — and the first of the new titles is just coming off the press.
Why Are You Here? Reading This is True, I mean. I’m going to take a stab at answering that question.
True recently hit its 25th anniversary. But can a weird news story that I posted at NASA before This is True was “invented” be traced? This weekend I decided to find out, since it’s a pretty “famous” story considering it never ran in the newsletter.
Last week, This is True wrapped up its 25th year of weekly issues. What a great ride it’s been — it went by in a flash.
UPDATE to the Update!
I Did Have to Stop Selling physical products to Colorado customers only because This is True is actually in Colorado. Jump to the Update or read on.
Sometimes I Smile, Sometimes I Roll My Eyes: About the news business, that is. As a news commentary column, news is, of course, the road this publication drives on. Here’s what I mean.
When readers unsubscribe from the free newsletter, the service I use allows them to send feedback — and while not everyone provides that, I always read it when they do.
Happily, the most-common feedback is along the lines of “I’ve upgraded to Premium” so they don’t want the subset of stories in the free edition that they’ve already read.
See Update Below! Patreon broke trust with every Patron registered with them, including This is True’s supporters, by suddenly announcing they would soon charge them more than their pledged amount. They billed it as something positive for creators. It absolutely is not: it is bad for creators. We creators got no advance notice of this, and no way to “opt out” … Continue Reading
In my recent post about watching the Internet “grow up,” I noted True was a driving force in setting the “best practices” around email publishing — I pushed the first true Email Service Provider to add features I wanted, and one of those features was “double opt-in.”
After My Discussion Last Week that said True is suffering tough times due to a reduction in Premium subscribers since the election, and really needs about 1 percent of you to upgrade to just get up to the “minimum sustainable” target to make the publication fully viable, Joe in California wrote to say he didn’t … Continue Reading
Long-time readers may remember that years ago, I had a separate mailing list called “Randy’s Random” — mostly jokes and funny stories. But how to deal with graphics? I didn’t want to email graphics, so Randy’s Random then morphed into Jumbo Joke, which (as you probably know) ran for years. I sold it in 2016.
True’s Patreon campaign to help keep this publication going has broken its first goal: scores of readers have joined together to get great rewards, and, as of last Thursday, together are now providing more than $1,000/month funding to help pay the bills.
Premium Subscriber Erik in Nevada wanted to really help True, but he didn’t want to do it via the new effort on Patreon, the “crowd-funding” platform for creative endeavors.
(Also see Update below.)
Last Week, I Noted I Had a High-Risk (but “audacious”) goal for True — and came up with a way to take most of the risk away.