Dear Readers,
I started News & Reviews in July 2021 and have been writing here every week for three years. The community we have built is amazing, but it is time for change.
When we first started I would alternate between ‘my weeks’ and ‘guest weeks’ (remember those?) and RooneyRama was the first ever special edition. Then I stopped doing guest weeks, started the paywalled special editions, and wrote essays. Then I started paying people in 2022 and we did the ‘Nerd’ and ‘Style’ special editions in between regular weeks. That lead us to News & Reviews Magazine in July 2023.
In total, 195 posts have gone out to-date. That is so, so huge.
In the past when I’ve felt News & Reviews needed to make these pivots, I would send out a huge reader survey and collate data from you all about what you wanted to see and read. But something has stopped me from doing that this time.
I took June off to think about it, and now I can say, from a place of deep thoughtfulness and respect: it is no longer important to me to ‘give people what they want’.
To be completely honest, I am finally in a position—for the first time in my entire writing career—of feeling that I can afford to be less servile and less strategic. I have a confidence that I didn’t have before. In previous years reader surveys meant I could give you what you said you wanted instead of completely owning and backing what I wanted to make. My feeling with the media space now though, is that we all have hundreds of outlets and newsletters competing to give us what they think we want.
And if I go by clicks and survey data, sometimes I see the worst of us. I see that although many of us, if asked, are dismayed at this ‘reactionary hot take’ media environment, when I put that type of content out, it gets the most clicks. The same with celebrity content. The same with cheap shopping items.
I don’t want to feed those machines. Three years of accumulated open and click rates tell me that if I posted more rants about private school boys and my picks from the sales every month, this space would grow exponentially. I’m not criticising people who make that content, I just think you can get that stuff elsewhere. Now is the time in my life and my career for me to think much more carefully not about what I can do, but more brutally about what only I can do.
As a voracious reader and consumer of news and culture media, I have outgrown my desire to be served what I already know and understand. I respect News & Reviews readers enough to presume the same of you too. We can sniff pretty clearly when we’re being served content by someone who has designed it for ‘a human of our demographic’. Media companies who pay for their work through advertising have to do this, obviously, because they need to be able to generate reports for their advertisers. But News & Reviews has been ad-free for ages. I am the god of this space and I can make it different.
When I bring to mind the individuals I really admire—people around the world who are at the peak of their creative and intellectual abilities—I do not want them to serve me up a data-informed, strategic meal catered to my tastes. I trust the chef! I’m here for the fucking chef! I like what they make because it comes from them to me.
It has been difficult to balance the ‘news’ section catering for both Australian and international readers, for example. And it has been frustrating to have so little space to rave about a book I’ve just read as one of three short good reviews. Let’s go off-menu. Let me serve you what’s in season.
I used to be so excited for newsletter day, but then it became too professional and I grew too conscious of serving a readership and tracking the subscriber stats. Remember the newsletter song? I can’t remember the last time I sang it. News & Reviews needs to return to being born of a desire to express myself and connect. I’m almost at 10,000 subscribers but I’d rather be singing again; time to take a risk.
This might all sound a bit dramatic if you’re new here, but for those of us who’ve been in News & Reviews together for multiple years, I think you’ll get it. Consider how much your own lives have changed in three years. Some of you have spouses or whole human children you didn’t have when we started here. Some of you have moved cities or jobs. We aren’t the same people. That’s a good thing. I’m not the same writer. I have proven that there are a lot of things I can do. It is time to drill down and drop down into what only I can do.
What will you be seeing here? Not sure. You’ll still get something every Wednesday at 5pm. It’ll still be some kind of news and/or reviews and it’ll be fresh. But the details will involve some trial and error. I’m getting excited just thinking about de-professionalising. Maybe I’ll go on a deranged diaristic content rollercoaster only to return to my lists-of-three in the end. Maybe I’ll bring you with me as I research Antarctica and anti-natalism. Maybe it’ll be a meme dump sometimes. The only thing I can promise is honesty.
I’m in the process of having Natasha Walsh paint my nude for her Hysteria exhibition, I’ve had some revelations after being off Instagram for a whole month, and I’m hand-writing my new novel. I’d like to write to you about these things.
Thank you to those of you who’ve come with me through all the twists and turns of the News & Reviews journey. We will have some fun charting a new course.
Best wishes and happy reading,
Bri Lee
Things I want you to know about:
If you’re in Sydney, make sure you see Anchuli Felicia King’s new play, American Signs before it closes in mid-July. King wrote the one-woman script for Catherine Văn-Davies, and her performance is electric. The way she changes her body and voice in a split second makes it sometimes feel like there are four people on stage. That mastery, of course, reminiscent of EJ Norvill in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The content is extremely dark, but also darkly funny, and I’m here for the skewering of corporate jargon. Gold star girlies beware: this play will personally attack you.
If I lived in Melbourne I’d book a ticket to see McKenzie Wark talk about her new book, Love and Money, Sex and Death, at the Wheeler Centre on Thursday 29 August. Bummer she isn’t coming to Sydney!
The only retail purchase I made in the entire month of June was a pair of E Nolan’s new ‘Moccasin’ shoes. Available for a limited time here and now. A little while ago I decided to spend proper money on timeless leather accessories, and care for them well. At $750 these loafers are an investment I intend to treasure.
New Sally Rooney fiction up now on The New Yorker here. Oh, and look! In this interview she talks about why she made the age gap between the protagonists in her new novel go the opposite way! ISN’T THAT SOMETHING COOL AND EXCITING TO DO LOL.
There have been so many news stories in the past 4-8 weeks about the proliferation of deepfake technologies, especially in schools. This one in the SMH a few days ago, and this on the ABC earlier in June about students making deepfakes of teachers too. I want to write something about this. Also, it reminds me of how much I want to have a Zoom where we all talk about the ending of The Work, because we didn’t get to do that (spoilers!) on tour.
HERE FOR IT!
Bri - I love it when you are you …. Just keep being you ( all of them ) and I will be there for you at 5pm every Wednesday. ✍️