I have already mentioned one possible development in our publishing activity this morning, providing an explanation here, and publishing the first in what might be a long series of articles under the generic title 'Richard Murphy's view on'.

This, however, is not the only development that we are working on at present. Whilst I have absolutely no intention of giving up publishing this blog, we have recognised, as a team, that we need to reach wider audiences.

The move into YouTube two years ago helped achieve that goal in one way. There are a great many people who are unwilling to read blogs who are more than happy to watch YouTube videos, as we have discovered, and our reach on that channel is now considerably bigger than it is here.

At the same time, the Substack phenomenon has developed over the last couple of years, so that, for many people, independent blogs like this one are now a little-known phenomenon, and Substack is their preferred source of independent reading. We think it would be foolish of us to ignore this trend, and so we are planning to invest more in that channel, partly to assist the publication of long-form content, to which it is particularly suited, partly to assist the presentation of material in a different way to that used here, and partly to reach different audiences.

Our experiments with this suggest that we can reach new audiences in this way, and that there is significant room for growth as a result. We have had 7,000 views on posts on Substack over the last couple of days, and now have almost as many subscribers to our email list there as we do to the subscriber list for this blog. And that has happened before we have put any serious effort into the design or presentation of the content, which we are now beginning to do.

The consequence is that some more essay-based material will now be appearing on Substack before it does here, and it may be that in future I will only provide links here to Substack material rather than reposting it, which is not always a good idea as a result of Google search algorithms, which get confused by the same material appearing in two places at once.

The first post of this type appeared yesterday and was itself the first of a three-part series on Reform, why it has grown, the challenges it creates, and the ways in which those challenges can be addressed.

Substack seems ideally suited to this series-style approach, and the remaining articles in this series will appear over the next few days before I move on to a series on the Greens, most of which is already in draft.

I will provide links to these materials here, but it may be worth your while looking at Substack for some content from now on because we are expecting it to become a major part of our publishing programme over time. If things work as planned, just as Thomas has a major role in the YouTube channel that we publish, I am expecting James to play a similar role in Substack content creation, although I will remain the primary content author and retain final editorial control in both cases.

That first Reform essay is available here, and the second may be out later this morning.

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