Woah, we're halfway there

Hiya, Michael here. I curate The Edinburgh Minute every morning. I’ve got into a habit of getting up early and pouring through about a hundred pages of local news pages and groups before 7am, so you don’t have to.

This week I’ll hit the 200th post landmark; a landmark I didn’t expect to ever reeach TBH. Making this a business was never the plan. But it’s half-way to becoming my full-time job. I have another part-time job that helps pay the bills. You can probably guess where this is going, so as usual I’ll try to keep it short.

Without the people who pay for The Edinburgh Minute, I would’ve probably given up by now. It takes a level of commitment I didn’t realise I had in me. No other ‘job’ has made me feel such a sense of duty to an audience and that’s purely down to the direct reader-writer relationship. Knowing you value what I do so much that 420 of you pay £5/month or £45/year (Substack takes 10%) is exactly what gets me out of bed. It tells me directly that this ‘Minute’ idea is useful. Subscribers tell me it better connects you to where we all live and it’s something you rely on. I take that responsibility seriously and have never missed a daily edition since people started paying.

The Edinburgh Minute supports other local news outlets too: you’ve clicked more than 200,000 links in these emails since launch earlier this year.

To fund this, my options are to either find a sponsor, run advertising or stick with subscriptions. I’ve chosen against ads because it allows this to remain 100% editorially independent. You’ll never get my opinion about the news and I’ll always link to sources as fairly as possible. There’s no clickbait or misleading headlines about things irrelevant to Edinburgh, no stories about Jane from Torquay’s miracle face cream and no auto-play video ads scaring the life out of you or hiding the ‘close’ button. It’s just a daily list of all the local stuff I can find that hopefully saves you the bother and maybe even shares a sense of pride about this brilliant place.

If that’s useful to you and you’d like to help keep it going, please consider subscribing. And if you already do pay, I hope you know I massively appreciate it. You can always help by spreading the word - using your referral code to get yourself a tidy wee saving here.

If this does become something I can focus on full-time, then I don’t plan to change much, don’t worry. I heard subscribers loud and clear in the last reader survey! So the Minute will always continue in the same format. Subscriptions help keep it free for those who can’t afford it, so sincere thanks again to everyone who already contributes. What would change is the quality of the email, it would be less rushed, the additional weekend and Wednesday Culture Minute would be much more organised into sections that make sense and I’d love to commission a local designer to make a logo and headers that weren’t just bashed together by me on my phone.

I’m also working on a way for us to get to know each other better. Details of the first Edinburgh Minute Meet-up will follow in the coming months, where subscribers will have a chance to say hello in real life and hear from some fascinating fellow-locals…

I said I’d keep this short, so I will. Thanks for reading, subscribing and sharing. See you tomorrow at 7am!