We are occasionally asked why we link to scientific journals, news outlets, and sometimes even opinion pieces that are behind paywalls.

In a world where HBO HBO Max Max and Spotify and everyone else raise prices once a month, it’s a great question:

Our newsletter is free — why the hell do we make you click through to something that costs money?

Is that prohibitive? Disingenuous? Does it create too much friction? Does providing — in our free newsletter — a brief synopsis of an otherwise paywalled article or post or whatever take away from that publication’s ability to make money off of their work?

Does that brief synopsis do remotely enough work to explain what otherwise required 500-5000 words from an actual journalist or expert in their field? How could it?

Are we even qualified to write that synopsis?

Maybe?

First off, we don’t make you click through to anything. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

Since the beginning, I have wrestled with not only what news to cover, but from which publications and journalists. How much opinion to include (vs straight reporting, data journalism, or peer-reviewed journals), and especially ones that challenge my priors. I have swung dramatically back and forth on exactly how much context to provide for each news item — from barely any and a clickbait-headline to a couple hundred words each.

We have been on quite the journey together.

Today, in Willow’s excellent hands (thank god/you’re welcome), the synopsis for each news item is closer to “just enough context that you, an extremely busy human who trusted us with your email address, don’t need to click through. But not enough to essentially “save you a click” and rob that publication of the fruits of their labor, and of course, to forsake you, a curious Shit Giver, the opportunity to go much deeper.”

You see, we care deeply about your desire to both go deeper and wider on what’s happening today, how we got here, and what it could mean for tomorrow.

To that end, we built Vibe Check, our extremely popular Members-only news dashboard, so you can read everything we’re reading (or pick and choose, filter by category, etc).

But even in the free Monday newsletter or essays, people who (can afford to) click through to the publications we cite and trust the most are able to dive far deeper into a category or even sub-category, like maternal health or clinical trials.

Like I said, I’ve been wrestling with this for a long time, and while having Willow on board and running the main newsletter has been indescribably helpful, it’s still not easier.

And that’s because — as you may or may not have heard, and for a variety of semi-villainous reasons — the very newsrooms we stand on the shoulders of are very, very close to disappearing.

And that’s very, very bad.

The current state of journalism is not great, Bob.

The Google-Meta (and to a less applicable extent, Amazon) trifecta have sucked up all of the advertising dollars, everywhere. We don’t need to rehash how print advertising fueled the 20th century publishing industry because when was the last time you read something in print?

Newsrooms bet it all on SEO, on Google ads, on the Facebook news stream, pivoted to video, pivoted to WhatsApp channels, only for random AI scrapers and not-so-random AI scrapers to come in and steal the last shreds of our best journalists’ best work.

If you are unaware, much like making a movie or TV show, journalism costs money. There are not only the capital costs, but salaries and payments to real people to do real, hard work. Giving it away for free in any way was a huge mistake which set readers expectations in the proverbial toilet. People and companies that steal it, repurpose it as their own, or pirate it can go to hell.

Because now, when the very truth is at stake, trusted, quality journalism is absolutely essential. We have developed and run society on systems so complex we barely understand them, and so the challenges we face are equally complex.

On the one hand, capital and profits continue to be hovered up by very few big tech monopolies (very little of which actually goes to the workers), and private equity eats all the rest.

On the other, well, here’s a thread about inequality in America, which is being covered less and less because local journalism doesn’t have the resources to cover it.

We spend a lot of energy and time imploring you to take action on the local and state level (or province or whatever), because that’s where you can get the best bang for your buck, and where you’ll feel it the most.

Local journalism is a perfect example of this kind of action, and — unlike colleges and churches that own a shitload of land but don’t pay property taxes — you’re putting your dollars directly into the local economy.

Full disclosure I have disclosed before:

Before the moon split off from the earth a bazillion years ago, I helped build the case for, and then actually build, the paywall at the Financial Times, a feature that’s been very successful for them.

Or could you?

Since then, publications the world over have transitioned from majority print to majority online, seeking at first to generate revenue from (truly shitty) display ads. New players entered the ZIRP scene fueled by VC dollars, social media, scale, and yes, ad dollars. You don’t get that kind of scale by charging people for your content. Your content had to be accessible to everyone, all of the time.

…until they expanded too quickly, untenable VC expectations went unrealized, and lately, money became much more expensive to get. Endless variations on paywalls were tried, including micropayments, which people generally hate.

Over time, fewer people read the news, conglomerates like Tribune bought up and then downsized integral legacy newspapers. Magazine publishers like Conde Nast (another place I briefly worked, and wow) were forced to finally reconcile a history of absolutely hemorrhaging money with how to bring in ads when tens of thousands of fewer readers were re-subscribing every year, driving ad rates into nothing.

Today, very few (actual) newsrooms of any size rely solely on advertising dollars, because they simply don’t have the scale to do so and still pay (actual) humans to produce high-quality content.

If they do, they may be either a small shop of just one or two (a “solopreneur”?), or part of a much larger operation. Your beloved Substack about underground vegan jazz music in Brooklyn may exist for now as a free subscription, but that may be because it’s a hobby, or maybe even a side-hustle, and at the very least, with any kind of paywall, could probably only barely support one human writer (to say nothing of the expenses of actual reporting, or, you know, health care).

Enter (or I guess, re-enter): curators. Or, us.

Our entire thing here stands on the shoulders of the world’s best journalists. So, yes, we will cite in-line the best quality journalism we can find on a given subject, whether or not there’s a paywall involved.

We really used to wrestle with this, but I do much less so today, because even if only 5% of you click-through and read a free article or run right into a hard paywall, and only 50% of those readers end up subscribing (maybe because we cite that place all of the time), that’s money in their pockets. That’s more journalism for you and for me.

Just by doing this particular job, it is my responsibility to do that. This practice may be less convenient to you, but in exchange, we have provided an extremely-considered synopsis — actually, a collection of them — to give you most of the info you need for the week, in five minutes or less.

We don’t do a perfect job, but if it was constantly shitty, well, you wouldn’t be here, would you.

But over a decade of free “news” means we are not only less inclined to pay for it, we have a very difficult time telling real news from mass mis- or disinformation.

In “What Do You Want?” I wrote:

Choosing what you give a shit about, who you’ll trust to tell you about it, and whether you’ll pay them for their services — that’s your responsibility.

We may promise — or only ask, I guess — five minutes of your time with the Monday newsletter (cough cough, maybe a little more for these essays), but we don’t cite these sources for our own integrity.

I actually do hope you’ll click through — and not just to eventually, having been worn down by The Guardian’s “hero” tool, buy a subscription or donate — but also to get more educated on the issues facing us today.

You signed yourself up for our work, so we assume you’re the kind of Shit Giver who’s already going to vote, etc. You’re among the most activated citizens on the planet. Our work can make you significantly more empowered to do your best work, whatever that may be.

But again, we are on a stepladder on the shoulders of journalists at places like The Markup, STAT News, ProPublica, The 19th, 404 Media, Rest of the World, Capital B, and elsewhere. We could never fully replace their work. We simply point you towards it.

It’s a little ass-backwards, but going much deeper on data ethics or women’s health or environmental justice will actually help you go broader, to connect the dots and begin to see the systems for what they are.

You are simultaneously giving yourself a more nuanced, ongoing understanding of, say, bodily autonomy and state legislatures, but also — unavoidably — voting rights, heat protections, nursing shortages, gerrymandering, and paid leave.

This is where Vibe Check comes in, of course. It’s our firehose — tagged by us and curated for you to go an inch deep or a mile wide or both, whatever your pleasure.

Add it all up, and you can be significantly more confident in your ability to not only participate, but truly engage in discourse and decision making — at home around the dinner table, in the board room, group chat, or school board meetings.

In “How to See The Forest”, I wrote:

This, but journalism. Investigative, local, data, whatever.

To be clear, I’m not asking you to do the work — though if you can, you should. I don’t understand how the brain works, but that doesn’t mean I’m not happy to be an extremely small cog in the complex machine of humans that are integral to real scientists slicing up grey matter on the regular.

When you share a link to The 19th on your Slack or WhatsApp or blue bubble thread, you’re — before anything else — introducing The 19th to a group of people who might not even know it exists! And further, your/their site visits, your ad clicks, your donations and subscriptions help reinforce not only that publication’s bottom line, but their ability to do more and better work, to hold more power structures accountable, and to release more marginalized people from them.

You are saying I want to be part of a society, nay, a culture, that values truth and inclusive reporting. By the people for the people.

We’ve come a hell of a long way, and we have a hell of a long way to go to build a radically more informed and better, more resilient and equitable future. It’s all right there in front of us, but I need you to participate.

Anybody who wants to respond about individual action vs systemic action can kindly unsubscribe. I’m not force feeding you another little ditty about Compound Action, the cumulative, ever-expanding impact(s) of individual choices, amplified through relationships, communities (IRL and not), and of course, time, because it’s fun.

Well, no, actually it is fun.

It’s exciting as shit because look at how far we’ve come! And by we I mean the people who came before us who — besides storming Normandy Beach eighty years ago this week — also subscribed to their local newspaper.

In that paper, they read about wars beginning, protested, and ending, about depressions and businesses going out of business, and later, about walking on the fucking moon, and more. It may have been a local paper, but it was a two-way lifeline to their community, it was an instrument for compassion, participation, and change. For decades, kids have been aghast at their parents making their way through the paper yet again, but that ritual was not only a public good, it was the expectation.

Our parents and grandparents might not have attended every city council meeting or actually watched Cronkite, live, but they sure as shit read about it in the paper — a news delivery device that said, “this is what’s happening now, and by who, and to who”.

Sometimes, the news may make you say “well isn’t that jolly” and other times it may make you say “What in the ever-living fuck”?

It is your responsibility — it is our collective responsibility — to act on those impulses.

Either way, you can’t be expected to take action if you don’t know what’s happening outside your home, around you, and around the world. And that’s why we provide sources from so many perspectives and from across the world.

I do not expect you to click through, much less to subscribe to every single paywalled news outlet, journal, or independent newsletter or podcast.

If you all already did that, maybe journalism wouldn’t be facing an actual market failure, at the hands of — again, yes, big tech, changing priorities and algorithms, and a long culture of free news, of private equity, and impatient and often frugal billionaire owners.

Not any one of these, but everything everywhere all at once.

But the hell if I’m going to stand by and watch it burn, or become as inequitable as everything else, where only The New York Times Games section and a bunch of independent bloggers can make a living — with no room left in the middle. The Atlantic’s billionaire owners can subsidize the time to turn things around with much more expensive writers and subscriptions (to “make something worth buying”), but billions hasn’t saved the LA Times from huge cuts, and every day it seems like Democracy Might Actually Die In Darkness, After All.

This, as the most vital sources are either suing Open AI or partnering with them, because the cash is good and down the road is somebody else’s problem.

I stand by our sources, and I am committed to promoting them so that I can continue to rely on them. So that journalism becomes a viable career again. So democracy survives, and is maybe even improved upon. So climate solutions and public health wins are shouted from the rooftops and tried in more places for more people.

In an exciting turn of events, more and more states (probably because half of US counties no longer have even a single local news source) also see journalism as a public good and are treating it that way, scraping together a host of incentives to actually, you know, subsidize journalism, the way it subsidizes fossil fuels.

We need them to go further, to compliment your new monthly subscription with encouragement and support for unions in newsrooms, so reporters can have/feed families.

How can governments do that in such a polarized world, when NPR is already under threat? Frankly, I’m not sure. But there isn’t some new business model coming to save newsrooms, this time.

It’s down to you and me, our wallets (Apple Pay), and our informed engagement — putting pressure on policymakers and stakeholders everywhere to save what is arguably the most important part of our society:

Our ability to know the truth, and to fucking do something about it.