Ch-ch-changes at Paris Unlocked Newsletter

And why I hope you'll choose to continue supporting this humble project

A random photo of a Bowie print gracing the window of a shop at Paris’ Viaduc des Arts (highly recommended for a stroll). Just *because*. Courtney Traub/All rights reserved

Dear Subscribers,

Forgive my gratuitous reference to the David Bowie song; I’m reading a fascinating book about his uber-grim Berlin years, so his discography is more on my mind than usual.

I’m writing today to let you know that I’ve decided to make some major changes to the subscription model for the Paris Unlocked newsletter. And, as I explain in more depth further down, I hope most of you will choose to continue supporting this work, in whatever ways you can.

From late June, I’ll be shifting from a “paid” version of the newsletter to one whose new posts and features will initially be free and available to all. And instead of “paid” subscribers, I’ll be inviting those who enjoy my work and wish to see more of it to become “donors”— and will continue to offer a number of perks to thank you for that precious support:

• Full access to the archive, which includes hundreds of features, reviews, news stories, op-eds and in-depth travel itineraries for Paris and France. The exclusive archive will keep growing, since after 6 weeks my newsletter posts and features will move behind a paywall

• Personalized e-mail consultations to help you prepare for a forthcoming trip to France, resulting in a “mini-itinerary” delivered electronically— and crafted with your preferences and interests in mind

• Special “sneak-peek” access to new audio features, interviews & videos, around 48 hours before I roll them out for free

Donor subscribers and “Star Supporters” will also, crucially, help me keep doing what I do for a living , especially in a time when AI is threatening the livelihood of writers everywhere. This is true for web-based writers like me, who have built websites from scratch, only to see search engines blatantly steal their stuff to train chatbots. More recently, Google started rolling out all-AI search, which is not only pretty much guaranteed to narrow our horizons like a horse’s blinders and kill the open web for good— it’s also set to further decimate income from web-based search.

If you still mostly prefer to hear from humans rather than from a chatbot, and think human expertise, passion, memory and taste still matter for something, doing what you can to support human writers and thinkers has never been so crucial.

And yet…I’m moving to (mostly) remove paywalls from this newsletter, at least for the first few weeks after I hit publish. Why?

Why I’m doing this

There are a number of reasons why I’ve decided to make this move, despite the fact that it means taking some considerable financial risks.

Ironically, part of it comes down to being angry about the tech industry’s all-out assault on Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the open web: one in which information would be increasingly available to a growing number of people, expanding knowledge and understanding. Utopian, sure. But it’s a vision I still firmly believe in.

And putting things behind instant paywalls doesn’t really align with that ethos. I want what I write to be freely accessible to as many people as possible, while balancing financial considerations. Hence my “hybrid model” of paywalling stuff after six weeks. Call it utopianism-meets-pragmatism.

I’m also frustrated with Substack’s paid subscriber model, which is too inflexible and doesn’t allow for things like sliding scales, one-time donations and more financially accessible ways of generating support from people.

Sure, I still need to make a living from this if I don’t want to have to go out and get a teaching job, or go full time as an academic editor (yup, that’s my other job). But I also understand that salaries aren’t rising for many people, the cost of living remains astronomical, and too much writing is paywalled these days.

Many can’t afford more than a single donation, or would like to give what they can to read. Sadly, as long as Substack doesn’t roll out these more flexible and accessible ways of subscribing to exclusive content, I’ve decided that I need to find a different way of being on this platform.

With that in mind, you can “buy me a coffee” with a one-time donation or recurring donation, for whatever amount you can manage, at Ko-fi. My hope is that this will introduce some flexibility to the picture, and allow me to share my work with as wide an audience as possible.

My last reason for the shift in model? Things are changing in both my professional and personal life. I’ve decided to pursue a long-term audio (and possibly video) project for this newsletter that will take months to produce, not weeks. So promising to churn out paid posts roughly every week just isn’t feasible, even though I still fully intend to continue offering reviews, news round-ups, interviews and travel tips here. They may not be as regular as usual, but new stuff in print will still drop here— promise!

I also have a new baby on the way in August, and the next few months promise to be a bit slow and uneven on the work-schedule front. Taken all together, this shift makes sense— even if it may well mean I lose some subscribers. I hope that’s not the case, of course!

Whatever you can do— thank you!

Thanks so much for reading, and for being part of a community that makes everything I do worthwhile— genuinely. I appreciate your support, whether it’s in the form of a like-and-share, a one-time or recurring donation for whatever amount you can afford, or subscribing as a Donor or Star Supporter. Merci!

As always, if you have any comments, questions or a pestering desire for a certain topic or niche to be better covered here, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I can be reached here by email: editor@parisunlocked.com. You’re also very free to leave comments directly in this email, or any others you receive as a subscriber.

See you soon on the other side,

— Courtney