⏰ A new home for The Edinburgh Minute

Hopefully you won’t notice, but starting from tomorrow my daily emails to you will look slightly different. That’s because I’ve moved The Edinburgh Minute off of Substack. Your newsletter will still arrive daily and you don’t need to resubscribe. Even if you’re a paying subscriber, nothing will change and the price remains the same: £5 per month or £45 per year. Without paying supporters, the Minute wouldn’t exist, so thank you to every single person who backs it and keeps it going.

Why has the Edinburgh Minute left Substack? 

This move has been a long time in the making. The main reason is that the new platform I’m using, called Ghost, is run by a non-profit foundation that has been truly supporting independent journalism for years. They’re not chasing celebrities or influencers, they’re not sending you promotional emails you don’t want and they don’t need to repay problematic venture capitalists millions of dollars. Instead, they care about quality, rather than quantity and as a non-profit org they are reinvesting their money into helping tiny publishers like me by helping to make newsletters better. - If you’re interested in learning about the Minute’s new platform, read more here.

I always enjoyed listening to and learning from readers' feedback. And a lot of you were getting increasingly affected by various Substack issues. As an independent publisher, I needed peace of mind that readers would always receive the email. But I've encountered a recurring Substack problem for years whereby people would sign up to pay but then the newsletters wouldn’t arrive in their inbox. I reported this many times to Substack but each time was told that the reader must have disabled emails. Sometimes their settings had indeed changed, despite the reader insisting they hadn’t done anything. It was infuriating for everyone involved and happened too many times. It cost me a lot of money! Which all got me thinking: the fact people could opt out of receiving emails (while staying ‘subscribed’) made no sense to me. All I want to do is simply send you an email and for you to receive that email if you’ve signed up.

No more algorithms

Recently Apple slapped a 30% fee on top of some Substack subscriptions, which didn’t sit well with me. You shouldn't pay more. I’ve also seen Substack’s focus shift towards becoming a social media platform. Good luck to the founders and team, who were always helpful to me. But readers have also told me they are annoyed by promotional emails that they didn’t sign up for. There will be none of that in future. While I will personally keep using Substack for reading, there were other problems Minute readers told me they had with Substack that I sympathise with too. What started as a simple platform to send newsletters from has become another social media platform and a lot of us don’t want another social media platform. Algorithms and reaching as many people as possible = the antithesis of local news, in my opinion.

So here’s to a simpler future! I’m so grateful for your subscriptions, for your time each morning and for all your input on the Minute. I never ever thought this mailing list would reach 25,000 people, but word-of-mouth is a wonderful thing. 

If you want to leave a comment on a post, you can do that in the same way as before. Just use the email address you signed up with originally to log-in to your new profile on Ghost. I've migrated your profile over. It's the same email address you signed up with on Substack. But if you don't want to leave a comment and only want to receive emails, that's fine and you don't need to resubscribe. You're already signed up!

To reiterate, paid and free subscriptions will continue as normal and there's no cost change.

Your daily newsletter should stay the same. But the edinburghminute.com website (where every email is also published) is now slightly different. Please bear with me while I get to grips with it. There are some helpful bells and whistles I’ll be adding there, including Fediverse integration, which is going to be fun for us nerds. And the friendly folks at Ghost are keen to help me to help other people to launch their own versions of the Minute where they live. That's something I've been doing for a while. I've helped launch nearly 100 titles around the world and those are now sending millions of new visits to local publishers. Oh and I’ll be launching a dedicated Edinburgh Minute app soon-ish too. 

Thanks again for helping to keep the Minute ticking over. I can’t do it without you. 

- Michael

PS. As always, to send anything in to the newsletter, please continue use this form rather than emailing me. Making that process better for you is my next task!