Meta: Some changes coming for the Geography is Everything Substack

Sometimes you need to take a step back to see the bigger picture.

A bit of a different Thursday article for you today. While normally I try to find some piece of news and add some geographic context and commentary on top of it, I’ve opted to instead make more of an announcement concerning the future of this Substack. Don’t worry it’s not going away! But it’s going to change a bit.

You may remember that a few months ago I opted to turn on subscriptions for the summer. Basically I wanted to test it out and see what benefit, if any, it could provide readers. I had no idea how it well it would do, or really what it would take. The answer to both of those questions is:

1. Not bad actually!

2. Far more than I thought…

The reality is that, while many people opted to pay money for extra content, I just haven’t felt like I’ve been able to deliver a consistent and worthwhile set of benefits. If you’re paying me money, I want you to be very happy with what you’re getting. And unfortunately, I haven’t felt like I’ve been able to deliver benefits that are actually worth paying money for. As such, starting today, I’m pausing all subscriptions. They may come back in the future after I’ve reassessed things, but also maybe not.

At the end of the day, one of my biggest issues with offering paid subscriptions is that it’s gatekeeping content I want everyone to enjoy and participate in. And while I think everyone should be paid fairly for their work, I’ve just never felt super comfortable with creating content only for those who can afford it.

If you’re a current premium subscriber

You won’t be charged again until I turn subscriptions back on. If I do so, I’ll send an email notice well in advance to everyone who keep their premium subscription “active but dormant” so you can have plenty of time to cancel it. I’m really not sure how Substack handles pauses mid month with regards to refunds, if at all. So, here’s the deal:

1. If you’re an annual subscriber, please email me and I’ll refund you a prorated amount so you’ll only pay for the months you were subscribed.

2. If you’re a monthly subscriber, please email me and I’ll refund you the most recent payment.

You can email me at geographyiseverythingpod [at] gmail [dot] com.

Will you still be writing here?

Yes! But it might be a bit less than it has been over the last few months. I plan to still write the Tuesday articles as usual, but the “geography is the news” segment will be sunsetted. While I think there’s value in bringing geographic commentary to breaking news articles, I just couldn’t devote the time to it that I think something like that deserves. Basically, I’m just too dang busy!

This is probably not a surprise to anyone here, but in addition to writing articles here, I also have to write, record, and edit a video every single week, as well as write, record and edit a podcast every single week. Both of those take a lot of time and need to continue to be my focus as of now. While I want to continue to grow this community, the reality is that Substack doesn’t pay my bills, but does take up quite a bit of my time that should go towards those other things that do.

Again, this can and likely will be revisited in the future, but for now, I’ll be streamlining my content here so I can focus on delivering fun geography videos on YouTube, and entertaining and informative podcasts with Hunter.

Speaking of the podcast

One of the benefits of being a premium subscriber was ad-free podcast episodes from the Geography is Everything podcast. Going forward, we’ll still host the podcast here on Substack and it will continue to be ad free, but now anyone can listen to it! Think of it as a bonus for simply being here. We like having you and this community isn’t large enough to really put a dent in our ad revenue from the podcast.

Now the caveat here is that this might change in the future if, for example, we start getting most of our podcast listens through Substack. If that does happen we’ll likely need to figure out a way for it to pay for itself. But as of now, I’m not really worried about it.

Focusing my geography content

Going forward, one larger but also perhaps more subtle change, is how I’m going to be refocusing my content throughout. Up until this point, everything I wrote, recorded, and published was kind of siloed. So my YouTube video would be totally different from my podcast episode which would be totally different from my articles here. That system wasn’t working. It left me creatively scattered, and it simply didn’t allow for the kind of cross pollination of communities that I want to facilitate. Basically, I want my YouTube community to to join this Substack and listen to the podcast, I want my podcast audience to watch my YouTube channel and read articles here, and I want you all to watch my YouTube videos and listen to the podcast. This might be happening a little bit, but not enough.

So, going forward, my weekly content will now be much more focused on supporting the other platforms’ content as well. This doesn’t mean you’ll need to watch, listen and read all three to get the full story I’m telling, but it does mean that a single theme will be present across all three each week in order to create more cohesive content overall.

So, for example, if I create a YouTube video about Japan (which is happening!), the podcast episode for that week will also focus on Japan (which is happening!), and the weekly article here will also focus on Japan (which is happening!). The stories will be different but geographically they’ll build off each other to create a more consistent and, hopefully, enjoyable weekly experience for you all.

And that’s all! If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments. I’m happy to answer anything you might have!