Anniversary Posting (personal): A Few Things I learned ‘Substackin’ in the Past Year
More than half a million words later, here's a summary and some personal notes with me reflecting on online posting for a year
Personal introduction: I’ve been less active than I would I like have been in the past couple of days, and that has one particular reason. As I was cycling to catch the ferry two days ago, I had an unexpected ‘encounter’ with…well, something on the road. I think I hit a (scared) sheep, but I cannot be sure, ‘got off’ my bike over the steering bar, and hit the road head-first. One of our neighbours found me lying on the road, unconsciously, and instead of going to participate in a conference in Venice, Italy, I was taken to a nearby hospital where I stayed overnight.
In the end, I was quite lucky: apart from a broken helmet (I never bike without one) and torn clothes, I’ve “only” ended up with a few bruises and a bunch of fractured ribs, as well as a (light) concussion.
I’m back at home now, and while I feel o.k., I’ve been told, in no uncertain terms, that I should rest. So, long story short, posting will be somewhat limited during the next couple of days.
Substack Anniversary Notes
Almost exactly a year ago (26 Sept. 2021), I started posting on Substack. Here are links to my very first to postings (pt. 1 and pt. 2), and in the year since, I have written quite a bit about what I consider my newsletter’s mission statement:
I will cover contemporary politics, from a specific Central and Eastern European perspective, thereby providing context to a number of political and historical issues that may otherwise be inaccessible to the English-language reader.
I would like to believe that I’ve (at least tried to) lived up to this aspiration, and the number of readers of my content has increased over the past twelve months.
From 1 Oct. 2021 to the present (30 Sept. 2022), I’ve produced a little over half a million words of content, to say nothing about the numerous comments that my postings have elicited from you, my dear readers.
All content has been freely available, and while there was at first a clear slant towards Austrian (‘Covidistan’) and Norwegian developments on all matters Covid-19, I never intended my Substack to be geared exclusively towards this kind of coverage.
Earlier this summer, mainly due to a long-form essay on Austrian media coverage of Covid and the Russian-Ukrainian quagmire that appeared in Propaganda in Focus, I decided to tell you about my ‘real-world’ identity. Please find the posting from 15 Aug. 2022 below:
As one of the reactions of my essay, I was invited to Hügo Krüger’s podcase, which went on for much longer than planned and eventually resulted in an 1:45 hour-long conversation about ‘Propaganda, Feudalism, and Right-Wing Symbolism’.
Another plank was my incipient freelance journalism interests, which brought me to Austria-based, German-language platform tkp—the Platform for Science & Politics, which first published a few essays on Covid in Norway and two German-language conversations with friend-of-these pages Thomas Oysmüller. Thanks to his and publisher Peter F. Mayer’s interest in what I have to say, I have since been invited (upgraded) to a regular contributor): thank you, Thomas and Peter, for your trust, and I’m very much looking forward to our cooperation.
For those who don’t know tkp, it’s an independent, donation-financed, independent media outlet driven mainly by Peter F. Mayer and Thomas Oysmüller, which boldly covers topics ignored by the stenographers of power masquerading as ‘legacy media’ outlets of both state and private character.
While my posting will be somewhat limited in the next couple of days due to my bike accident, I will get back to my regular posting activities before too long.
And now, a few things I learned in my first year of online blogging:
A Few Things I Learned ‘Doing’ Substack for a Year
Bring content to the English-language audience that isn’t otherwise available. I know this sounds odd, but my mother-tongue is German, hence it’s quite easy for me to scan legacy media and ‘decode’ the spin. I began with posting about Austrian events, specifically from October/November 2021 onwards (check for ‘Covidistan Annals’) as the international media coverage was abysmally bad; the one thing that was even worse, of course, was the domestic Austro-Covidian media coverage, but that’s something else entirely…
Would that mean I’m free of bias? Of course not, but I hope my long-term readers acknowledge my willingness to, and sincerity in, declaring my biases and the like, if they would cloud my judgement and/or affect my reasoning.
I learned that even-handedness in reporting isn’t the same as having opinions about this or that item; it’s much more important, though, to clearly label facts (reporting) from opinions, which I typically do by highlighting passages, adding commentary in translated materials (in squared parentheses), and ‘Bottom Lines’ at the end. This has worked quite well, I think, and I do believe that this has positively affected the credibility of my postings.
At first, until mid-August 2022, I posted under the penname ‘epimetheus’, liberally borrowed from Ancient Greek mythology, but this summer I decided to disclose my true identity. On the one hand, this was liberating as it allowed me to take a much more offensive stance on a number of issues, be they school politics in Austria or participating in an interview with the German-language Kontrafunk (at time stamp 13:27, if you understand German) and an invitation by the RPP Institut to lecture on ‘Modern Propaganda’ (also in German), which will be available from mid-October 2022 onwards.
On the other hand, doing so invited a lot of feedback, in particular with regard to my more frequent columns over at tkp.at. Not all of this feedback, I would assume, is positive, and while I have absolutely no problem discussing and debating my standpoints, some of these comments are clearly ad hominem attacks and other forms of vitriol. I consciously disclosed my identity, expected some pushback, and will continue to post and speak my mind as I see fit.
What about mistakes? Well, I did a few of them (not counting some minor typographical mishaps), most prominently the coverage of an alleged RAND paper that the think tank later denounced as ‘fake’ and ‘bizarre’. Please see the original posting here, an update here, and the third part below:
I noticed that the more controversial the content, the more ‘attention’ my postings seem to get. On the one hand, this may be ‘good’ for eliciting more subscriptions and the like, but since I decided to offer my content for free, there’s really no benefit in doing so. I’d rather have conversations with my readers about substantive matters, and I don’t see many, if any, benefits in doing click-baiting.
Speaking of comments, well, I doubt that my Substack is special in this regard, but comments have been overwhelmingly on-topic and posted in the spirit of open exchange. The only comments I had to delete were the occasional ‘offer sex for money’ spam postings, but that’s basically it. I hope this will continue to be the case, in particular as some of the postings get much better (for me) for engaging with the comments, but I also know that as my readership grows, it will get trickier to engage with you all.
One final thing: I greatly appreciate your readership, and I’m very much looking forward to the next year of Substackin’. You can expect regular content in the next year, all of which will come for free—as I’m doing all of this in my spare time because I like good information and informed debates. I shall continue to be open about limited posting periods, in particular as my personal and professional lives as a professor of history have the habit of interfering with my spare-time activities.
Bottom Lines: Thank you For Reading!
So, in the spirit of me thanking you for reading and commenting, I hope you shall forgive me for not posting as much in the next couple of days for the above-mentioned reasons, but in exchange I’ll offer you the below pictures, taken yesterday while my wife drove me home from the hospital.
Praying for fast... fast recovery 🙂 beautiful pictures enjoy the view ❤️
Damn! Get some rest! No brain damage, pretty please. (Gorgeous photos, btw.)