My Writing is Moving, and This Site Will be Ending

If you have liked my writing on economics, all is well, and you can still find my new articles, but I won’t be posting here anymore. I hope you will follow me to my new location thedailydoom.com, which is the Substack site I have been developing, but it now has its own unique domain name, which is truer to what the site is about (in a tongue-in-cheek manner) and easier to remember for people hearing it for the first time on a podcast. I’ll explain the move below:

(NOTE TO PATRONS: I have already tried to make sure all of my active Patrons got moved over with a complimentary one-month subscription to all content, so if you do not receive all new articles by email, starting June 5, please contact me at WritelyYours [at] gmail.com, and I’ll make sure to get things working right for you.)

My goal has always been to make as many of my articles that fight the Fed and the federal government over their gross mismanagement of the economy free to help as many people as possible because I have felt pointing out the mismanagement and skullduggery is that important. My Patrons have helped make that possible. So has living off my savings, which was never sustainable for the long term. With my savings working down as I feed this effort, I needed to make a big decision this year about how too continue.

I decided to make a big change to keep things going and improving by concentrating all my efforts on publishing via Substack where things look more promising. This site, The Great Recession Blog has several disadvantages that I’ll explain below, and Substack offers some new positives both for me and, I hope, for all my readers:

The pros and cons of moving on

Hopefully, my publication on Substack will offer more content for everyone and be more efficient. It should be handier because you can subscribe for free, and all the free articles will go straight to your email so you won’t have to keep checking my website to see if I’ve written anything. Those who continue as my paid supporters on Substack will find more content because I’ll have more time because I won’t be publishing in three areas as I have been doing lately — here, on Patreon, and on Substack. It will be easier for everone — whether a paid subscriber or free — because everything will be in one place.

I’ve been writing a short article/editorial every weekday morning in The Daily Doom, which required a password on this site because my news headlines are for subscribers only. On Substack, I can make the part I intend to share for free available to all readers and put the privileged content for my supporters in a second part of the article behind a paywall. So one article serves booth groups without the need of ever entering a password.

The news headlines that each morning’s editorial is based on will be available exclusively to supporters as my way of continuing to thank them for their support, but everyone can read the editorial, keeping a good deal of the broad free access I aim for. I can also still offer privileged content that gets emailed only to paying supporters, or I can make some of those articles available to anyone. The nice part is everyone can get whatever they are eligible for automatically in their email, so you won’t have to plow through a page of “protected” articles to find the content that is free.

Besides getting exclusive access to the weekday news headlines in The Daily Doom, paid subscribers will also continue to get the articles I have been writing exclusive for Patrons for year now as my appreciation for their support. These exclusives I’ll now headline as “The Deeper Dive” because they will be the articles that dive into all the details in economic data while my daily editorials are more concise than I used to write as some people have asked for that.

Here is a quick list of the benefits I see for all subscribers, even the free ones:

• You won’t ever again have to check my site just to see if I wrote anything. Articles will be emailed to you as soon as they are published. You can, of course, go to my Substack site to read them there if you prefer or to comment if you wish. The new site name, again, is now simply www.thedailydoom.com.
• No more clutter from The Daily Doom articles that are password protected. Everyone will be able to read as much of each of those daily articles as they are allowed based on their subscription. You will not get any emails that are for paid subscribers only unless you are a paid subscriber.
• You will get an article that is more concise every weekday than what I have usually been writing.
• Articles will be much easier to read on a cell phone or small tablet. About 40% of my readers view articles by mobile devices. This website looks really awful on phones, and there wasn’t much I could do about that without a long overdue total overhaul that was going to be time-consuming and that would cost me. Substack ends that problem with a much cleaner look.
• You see, the WordPress theme I originally used when I created this site twelve years ago hasn’t been supported with updates or IT assistance for years, so it has become way past time to do a major overhaul to a new theme to get everything to run right again. Some features weren’t working right for readers; some editing features were no longer working for me, making the writing more frustrating. For a non-IT guy, even routine maintenance/repair issues could sometimes take the better part of a day to figure out. So, I’ve been putting the overhaul off. Substack takes care of all the maintenance and upgrades.

Here is a list of the benefits particularly for paid subscribers:

• Passwords have been annoying to some Patrons, even causing them to drop their support over it. The paywall at Substack automates the privileged content supporters can see versus what everyone can see. You won’t even see the paywall if you are paid subscriber! (You will, however, see but won’t need to use the subscription buttons I add to encourage free subscribers to become paid subscribers.)
• I’ll be dropping Patreon entirely once everyone has terminated their support there and hopefully renewed their support through Substack. Eventually I’ll pull the plug on this site, too, to save money, but I am leaving it up now so people can follow these breadcrumbs over to me.
• The in-depth content will generally be exclusive to supporters, and I’ll let everyone know in the free morning editorial that I’m working on a deeper dive into what is said in that edition, which you will receive in your email as soon as it is finished.

There are benefits for me, some of which will be better for readers, too, because of my increased focus on content:

• I will save on routine maintenance time that I have to do with my own site and avoid the days I would have to put in on a major site overhaul.
• I get to ditch the now obsolete name “thegreatrecession.info” or “The Great Recession Blog” that I started with twelve years ago. It has become dated to the point of being a detriment, and blogs are not the big thing they once were either. People seeing that name whenever they are going to click on a link may think, “I don’t want information about the Great Recession” even though the articles rarely have anything to do with the Great Recession anymore. All my promotion was forced to use that name. Now I will be using a timeless name for a more news-based site that gives more room to run in other directions — “thedailydoom.com.” Godaddy (the domain registrar) says any site starting with “thedaily” is a “high-value name,” more likely to be searched or clicked on from a search page, and I am already seeing better Google results, and the name was available at their normal bottom rate. Hopefully, people get that there is a little tongue-in-cheek humor in the name in that doom is what much of the news contains anyway, especially these days, so why not get a laugh out of it by calling the news what it usually is? At least, it doesn’t sound like info about the Great Recession, and it’s easy to remember if you hear it on a podcast, plus “the daily doom dot com” rolls off the tongue with some catchy rhythm and alliteration (I think; you may feel otherwise).
• All of my promotion can now be focused on the success of a single site, instead of being divided between Substack and my own site.
• I will only have to stay current on how to operate one system, versus three, since they all keep changing how they do things so require relearning as new versions come out. (Even this site with its obsolete theme, still gets monthly changes in how the root program WordPress works.)
• All of this frees me up to focus on just research and writing.
• There is no need to protect from malware and spam. The Great Recession Blog sometimes gets over a hundred malicious attacks in a day, especially from Russia, so I have to pay for software to protect from that. Substack takes care of that.
• Thus, I save all the costs of running my own site. I will lose ad revenue, but that never did more than cover the costs of running the site anyway.
• Some of my articles on Substack are about other daily-news subjects, and that is a change I need for some fresh air, after writing about nothing but economics for almost two decades (twelve years on The Great Recession Blog).
• There is a lot of good company I’ll be among on Substack, some very professional writers as well as amateurs, and some other publications there are great about sharing links and promotion with sites where they feel some kinship. Doomberg, for example, has been kind in referring readers my way. I think I can do more within a community that still allows me to do totally my own thing.

My special thanks to one Patron, Lindy, who recommended I try Substack. I needed to experiment with it for awhile to know how it would really work out, but I think it may work better for me and my readers overall. It will certainly work better for the 40% of readers who connect by cell phone or small tablets. So, here we go:

To make things easy, you can subscribe right here (as either a free or paid/supporting subscriber) right now if you have not already:

Even if you don’t subscribe to the free email list, you can still read the editorials. You just won’t get the articles you are eligible for in your email; but you can open them on the site (TheDailyDoom.com). Free subscribers will also receive occasional free Deeper Dives in their email from time to time, but not regularly like supporters.

With sincere appreciation to all readers for their patience while I experimented with Substack, for encouragement along the way these many years, for your comments here and the promotion of articles via Twitter, etc.; and especially thank you to those of you who have given your financial support. The journey continues but just down a different information highway. I hope readers will share in the comments or by email how this transformation goes from your end.

–David Haggith