Note to my readers
Introducing optional paid subscriptions
My Substack is less than three months old, but I’ve just introduced paid subscriptions for the first time. I want to thank the followers who had already made monthly or annual subscription pledges - some of whom left public comments:
Your work is more important now than ever considering what's happening not only in the US, but also in Canada where I live and many other countries around the world.
We need all the honest, clear-thinking, evidence-based health reporting we can get!
Gary, you are one of the smartest people I know on this subject. So glad you're getting back on the court.
I want you to keep going with your important mission of keeping the media honest about health reporting. Bad journalism has fed the growing public mistrust of science.
Best critiques of media coverage of health research, and calls out its shoddiness, incompetence and sometimes outright falsehoods. Also applauds the ones who get it right for the public’s benefit.
Gary, I'm so glad you continue to call out all the quackery and false hopes Pharma and its advertisers pile upon us day after day, ad after ad to keep us sick and beholden to their costly drug regimens.
I really want to support you because I value good journalism and long for good reporting on our health care system.
Those people made pledges just in case I ever switched to paid subscriptions. And now I have.
After publishing online very actively for 16 years from 2006-2022 on my HealthNewsReview site, I shut down the site because my philanthropic funding expired and the costs of maintaining and upgrading the site exceeded my reach. Since then I’ve yearned for a platform from which I could continue the mission of helping people improve their critical thinking about health care. Substack has become that new platform.
I’ve had a lot of fun publishing on this site. The response from readers has been gratifying. I hope that more readers will suggest more topics more often; several of the articles I’ve posted so far started with an idea from a reader. I’m interested in anything you see in the news, on talk shows, in commercials, advertising, marketing - anything that you think warrants some scrutiny because of how it might pollute the public dialogue on a particular health care issue. That’s what I try to focus on.
Getting back to the keyboard has taken up a great deal of my time. It appears I’ve jumped back into this habit much more fully than I anticipated. It’s not unusual for me to work on an article over several days’ time - planning, researching, writing and re-writing before I finally hit the “publish” button. My wife - a retired nurse - is my only editor - and a very good one - and our discussions lead to countless rewrites.
There are costs associated with writing as much as I do. My computer is aging.
My hard drives are filling.
The subscriptions I pay for in order to do my work add up.
That’s why I finally accepted the pledge-to-pay subscriptions and why I’m now asking other readers to consider a paid subscription.
Almost everything I write will remain free to all readers. But I’ll offer some privileged access to some material only to paid subscribers. I’m still learning about the Substack process and have been observing what other writers do for paid subscribers. So this will be a work-in-progress for some time. If you have suggestions for what add-ons would be valuable to you in return for a paid subscription, I’m all ears.
I’ve read where other writers refer to paid subscriptions as a kind of “tip jar.”
I like that comparison. I’m not going to get rich off paid subscriptions, to be sure. That’s not my intent. But it may help fuel my fires a bit on dark, cold Minnesota mornings or it may cool my brain a few degrees in the dog days of summer.
Paid or not, I am grateful that any of you think my work is worth reading. I do put 50 years of health care journalism experience into this effort, and I look forward to sharing some of that experience with you going forward.