Newsletters

How Politico’s Playbook went from must-read to spam

Imagine one day you walk into your local watering hole and find out that all of your favorite bartenders have been hired away. In their place are new “cocktail specialists,” who are too busy flirting with one another to actually help customers. When they finally pour you a drink, they are awfully stingy with the booze. You briefly grieve over an overpriced vodka soda and then vow to never go back to that awful place. That’s more or less how I feel about Politico’s Playbook, the newsletter that was once the go-to morning read for Washingtonians. Reporters, lobbyists, government employees and politicians used to consume the daily newsletter before their first cup of coffee.

playbook
substack

Why I didn’t start a Substack

When I first began thinking about restarting my email newsletter, Prufrock, after a nine-month break (during which I cycled the Blue Ridge Parkway twice, slept until six every morning, and read novels), one option I considered was Substack. I started Prufrock in 2013 when there were very few newsletters, especially on the right. It was basically Ben Domenech’s The Transom, Michael Brendan Dougherty’s The Slurve, and Prufrock. Sometime around 2016, everyone had a newsletter. Then came Substack in 2017, which grabbed people’s attention in 2019 when Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes agreed to run their new publication, the Dispatch, exclusively on the platform.