I have a few individuals that I pay particular attention to, but not necessarily a publication. For a time, The Information was a publication I thought of subsc

I have a few individuals that I pay particular attention to, but not necessarily a publication. For a time, The Information was a publication I thought of subscribing to. However, they do a lot more than just publishing. They built a community, and have a number of non-publication, community interactions — member-only Slack, for example. You cannot really have loyalty unless you have a community. Loyalty results from the personal relationship individuals make to each other within the context of a community. “Loyalty”, in the context of a subscription is still largely framed as a transactional exchange of value in the guise of a community. In that frame, without real, personal relationships, the only thing keeping someone there is value and cost-of-cancelling (laziness, inertia). Perhaps this is why substack is gaining more traction. Maybe this is why podcasts had become very popular. Maybe this is also why traditional publishing models are dying.