Why subscribe?
News Items is a collection of news stories, commentaries, analyses, essays and research reports that I think are interesting or important (or both). The items are usually 2 or 3 sentences long.
The preamble to the daily dispatch describes what News Items is about:
Four baskets: (1) World in Disarray, (2) Financialization of Everything, (3) Advances in Science and Technology, and (4) Electoral politics, foreign and domestic. Six days a week, not Sundays. By 6:45am ET on weekdays. In the morning on Saturdays.
News Items is distributed at or around 6:45am ET, Monday through Friday, and by 9am ET on Saturdays. It will not be distributed when I am on vacation, which is roughly five or six weeks every year. Commentaries written by me will be distributed after they are published elsewhere or immediately after I have finished writing them.
Whenever possible, the News Items morning email uses the exact language used in the reports, commentaries, essays, etc. Some items are edited for clarity or cohesion. Hyper-links take you directly to the source(s) cited.
News Items usually consists of 15-20 “items” and (at the end) “Quick Links” and “Political Links,” “Pandemic Links” and “War.” The “Quick Links” section is self-explanatory. “Political Links” aggregates the latest political news from The Cook Political Report, Real Clear Politics, Politico and Political Wire, along with 8 or ten newspaper and network websites that have “politics” sections. “Pandemic Links” are aggregated (in the main) from what are called “the science books,” meaning magazines and websites like Nature and Cell and Science Daily (to name three of the best ones). “War” is war.
News Items relies on roughly 65-75 websites for its source material. Many of those sites are pay-wall protected. Taking this into account, items sometimes run long, so that the reader (hopefully) gets the “gist” of the “story.”
News Items began distribution in the summer of 2016. For most of 2018 and a while in 2019, it was distributed to a wider audience by The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council. It is now an independent “newsletter.”
I am the founder and editor. Tom Smith is the assistant editor. A “managing editor” will be joining the team soon. A science researcher will be joining the team sometime in November.
To find out more about the company that provides the platform for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
