Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Why Substack?

 Occasionally, a new acquaintance or reader will ask me what I am trying to accomplish by publishing here on Substack every day, 365 days a year. It’s a good question, one I ask myself as well.

This project started during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, like virtually everyone else, I found myself isolated, unable to see friends or relatives, dependent on social media to connect with others.

In my case, the pandemic coincided with several other factors to deepen my sense of isolation. After more than a half-century living in San Francisco, I left the city. And due to a series of serious health incidents, including a stroke, I was forced to retire after a long career in journalism.

During my illnesses, I spent many weeks in medical institutions, including hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, rehab centers and finally an assisted living complex.

Once Covid hit, my isolation became extreme, as I could no longer leave my room to socialize or eat meals with the other residents. I began to wilt like a flower without sunlight or water.

My family saved me. I left that place to move in with my oldest daughter and her family.

And I started writing these short essays every day. (For many years, since 2006, I’d been blogging on a less regular basis.)

During the pandemic, at first I published them on my personal page at Facebook. People responded from all over the world and very soon I hit the limit of 5,000 friends. Given my 55-year career in journalism, many of these Facebook friends asked me for my thoughts not only on Covid but on the news of the day beyond the confusions of the pandemic.

In response, I started sifting through the headlines in various authoritative news sources to provide a kind of virtual news broadcast via the social network. That eventually grew from ten or twenty headlines to forty or fifty and on some days up to ninety stories per day.

But I found Facebook (now called Meta) limiting because it is extremely difficult to include links to the news stories I aggregate, which I want to do so readers can see for themselves why I have chosen those particular stories for inclusion.

Meta also seems to punish people who try to include links, because whenever I used workarounds to make the headlines clickable, my traffic there fell close to zero.

At the urging of readers and friends, I moved my operation here to Substack, which provides the ability to link directly to the sources I cite, plus a subscription option for those who wish to support my work.

So that is my story.

HEADLINES:

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