5 March 2024
Not much to report on today. The first official issue of foofaraw review of links went out to all foofaraw subscribers today as a preview. I'm waiting to see how many unsubscribes I get for that...
But around foofaraw, I've been giving myself a bit of a headache thinking things through, so I'm going to be doing a bit of that here now too... (this will likely be used to write a fuller post on the history of foofaraw).
In practice, today, foofaraw is essentially three things:
The monday media guide—this started it all, originally just as streaming variability to create a schedule of shows for the week and keep up with new shows coming out.
This expanded to having separate editions for comics, movies, and music—until I combined them all with the move to Buttondown.
I think this is a pretty great offering if you are someone interested in keeping up with what's coming out in the world of entertainment—especially if you share my taste.
The more zine-like weekend edition—as I've started paying people to contribute, this has become my favorite part. The idea of creating a "zine" with other people has always been something I've wanted to do so I've shoehorned it into foofaraw.
The goal here is to become the lofi/punk/surreal version of The New Yorker in "zine" form—both digitally and hopefully a collected edition of six months worth of issues.
I now have three regular contributors and the interview series which allows me to fill a full month of Fridays, every month.
I also have one potential that I'm publishing this Friday and a second that I might get to at least publish one thing from...
The goal, however, is to have more than one feature every Friday. In a perfect world I think I'd like to have three every Friday (this Friday will be the first to have two).
The format for this is something I'm trying to figure out...
Do I combine them? Do they live separately on the website, but go out in one issue through the newsletter? If they live separately on the website, where do I put my intro/outro...?
This is currently the biggest question I'm trying to solve. I don't know that there is a right answer, but it's giving me a bit of a headache.
Lastly, foofaraw review of links—which is the new twice weekly paid feature I just launched with the hope that some people will want to support the newsletter or at least the weekend edition.
This follows the [SIC] / Feed Me format of going more into link aggregation and industry analysis.
I want to still improve this to be something that brings in quotes from each piece following the Washington Review of Books format a bit.
It's quite a bit of work though already for the two days—so wanting to expand the format and get to three days (maybe even four, although the fourth would be a new format) is quite a bit of work.
I have to maintain the day job, after all...
So I'm sticking with what I have for now with the hope that consistently will be enough to get some people on board.
I don't even want to have to think about marketing... I hate self-promotion... I did create an Instagram account, which I'm really not a fan of and I'm terrible at remembering to post to so I usually do in batches like I just did for yesterday's and today's...
Hope all of that wasn't too excruciating for anyone that made it this far...