Five things to read while not reading newsletters

This week’s active calls, a short August break and some of our better work from 2026.

We are taking it easy for two weeks in August, as usual.

If you are even a little bit in the newsletter game, you know what July and August do to open rates. If you are not, two things: A) get into the newsletter game, it’s fun; and B) very few people read niche newsletters in July and August, especially the kind of B2P stuff we publish here.

So this week, it’s only the active calls. Next week, barring a major media-funding-related emergency, there will be no newsletter at all. We’ll be back with our regular programming on 27 August.

In the meantime, if you simply cannot enjoy the beach, the mountains, a staycation or a relatively empty office without reading about media and money, then you are basically me. Also, here are five posts from this year that I thought came out rather well.

• The market for belonging

• The problem at the heart of Europe’s journalism funding debate

• Why Europe should buy Substack

• We analyzed 859 newsletters: these are the things publishers keep missing

• Diminishing returns on media capture

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Here are the 28 active calls (4 new), with the largest at the top: