Kyle Chayka wrote about the rise of really-local newsletters for the New Yorker and quoted me saying that “reinventing the wheel is underrated.”

A fact checker texted me to see if that quote was accurate, and I said yes, in the context of the wheel being messed up by recent misadventures. I elaborated:

“I mean that social media messed up the wheel. The social media platforms inserted themselves into the relationships between publishers and readers, which ruined the model of trust and changed the incentives for media. A direct-relationships model, which is what newsletters offer, fixes that problem. The wheel, a beautiful, powerful thing, gets reinvented.”

I think the reinvented wheel will make the next local news era better than the last. More things are possible with the new tech stack, and subscriptions make it sustainable. Direct relationships win.