🔗 A roundup of the latest news, updates and opportunities follows below, so keep scrolling! 👇️ 

In praise of down time

When you’re setting out on an independent career path, how do you ensure you’ve got a plan for downtime – whether planned or unplanned?

If you’re reading this today, that means I got my act together to prep and schedule a send for this week and that while you read I am (ideally) sitting on a beach on the Eastern Seaboard with feet in sand and book in hand 🏖️📖🌴.

Like the creator-model journalists we support, Project C is a small business. We don’t have an official vacation policy, but do center balance and intention in as much of our approach to this work as possible. Some weeks – some days – are an all-out sprint. Others (like Aug. 11-15 for me) balance that with some much needed time away from devices, strategies and work brain. Whenever possible, we try to build that balance into our daily schedule, too, carving out time for walks or other screen breaks that give our brains a much-needed breather.

In our Going Solo workshop, we advise our cohorts to make sure they’re thinking about all of this time management (or bandwidth management, sanity management?) up front, too. Instructor and Links I Would GChat You If We Were Friends writer Caitlin Dewey is just returning from parental leave. Her strategy for covering the time off this summer? Some pre-planned best-of re-posts and an appeal to her audience to help her fund her leave. Others reach out and have guest-posters take over while they’re away.

There’s no one-size-fits all formula. Find what works for you and evolve as needed.

See you all next week! - Liz 

the latest things

📌 The Atlantic notes that the youngs are getting a lot of their news from the TikTok. Aaron Parnas makes the point that most of his followers “don’t watch the news and never have and never will.”

📌 Will the flood of cable TV anchors going indie all make it? Probably not, per Variety. In response, the networks are pivoting to foreground in-house talent as personalities.

📌 One to watch: In Proximities, independent journalist Barry Malone promises three non-Western news stories you should know about every day.

the useful things

📌 Substack rolled out A/B headline testing, along with a few other upgrades – like profile themes, to allow a smidge more customization.

📌 YouTube is testing a new collab feature with a small group of creators that lets you tag a collaborator on a video — kind of like the collab tools on Instagram or TikTok. The video would then get recommended to both of your audiences.

📌 Ghost is making it easier to publish to the social web - publications can be natively distributed across social platforms like Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, WordPress, Flipboard, and more.

📌 Is beehiiv on track to be the next billion dollar newsletter platform? (💲)

📌 Benchmarkers take note: Glueletter is out with two new useful reports on average newsletter open and click-through rates.

cool things to do

📌 Join me in Salt Lake City Oct. 19-21 for the brand new Business of Local Conference. I’m looking forward to learning from publishers and local entrepreneurs who are evolving their businesses and making real revenue gains.

📌 Sign up to be among the first to hear the findings from the FT Strategies/Google News Creators’ Project. Initial findings will be presented in a Sept. 3 webinar.

📌 Cleo Abram has been added to the speakers list of Colin & Samir’s upcoming Press Publish NYT Summit (Sept. 4). Abram will also join a conversation with former NYT EIC Dean Baquet on Oct. 4 as part of Poynter’s Salon Series.