A standing note
Editorial philosophy
A page about how this newsletter is made — what it covers, what it won't, and what readers can hold me to.
Most newsletters do not publish their editorial standards because they do not have any. The cadence is whatever the writer can sustain, the topic drifts with whatever has performed lately, and the only line anyone is held to is the open-rate graph. I have been a reader of newsletters for two decades and I have written this one for nearly five years, and I have come around to the view that the writer owes the reader something more declared than that.
This page is that declaration. It will be edited over time — practice is a long argument with yourself — but the changes will be visible in the version history, not slipped in quietly. If a policy here ever contradicts something I do in an issue, the policy is the side I am trying to be honest about, and you should call me on the difference.
The three subjects
Field Letter is a weekly essay on three subjects, in rough rotation: climate, cities, and technology. I picked them on purpose, and I have worked inside two of the three. They are also the three subjects where I think the public conversation is most reliably bad — too dramatic on one end, too breezy on the other, and almost never patient with the actual mechanics of how change happens at the municipal scale.
On climate. I am not interested in the version of climate writing that is mostly weather porn. The story I keep coming back to is the slow, accreting version that shows up in actuarial tables, insurance markets, and the line items of a public-works budget years before it shows up in the news. That story is dull in the moment and terrifying in aggregate, and almost nobody is writing it for a general audience.
On cities. The only level of government most of us have meaningful leverage over. I spent six years inside two of them, on the unglamorous end — storm drains, zoning variances, transit-route reviews — and I came out convinced that the average municipal decision is made by fifteen people who have never been asked their opinion in public. That is a problem with a fix.
On technology. The tone I aim for is the one a reasonable carpenter might take toward a new power tool: interested, skeptical, and unwilling to install something in the middle of every day on faith. I do not write breathless coverage of model releases. I do write about what we have collectively agreed to without ever having a conversation about it, which is a longer list every year.
The cadence
One essay a week, Sunday morning, Pacific time. Between fifteen hundred and three thousand words, occasionally longer when the subject warrants it. Holiday weeks may slip to Monday. I have missed three Sundays in five years and I will tell you which ones if you ask.
I will not publish more often than weekly. The discipline of writing one good piece, fully edited, is not the same discipline as publishing daily. I think the second one ruins the first, and I have watched it happen to writers I admire. If you came here for frequency, this is not that newsletter, and I am happy to recommend one.
I will not publish less often than weekly except in cases of family or medical need. The contract with a Sunday reader is the only one this newsletter has, and I take it seriously.
What this newsletter will not do
A short, declared list. I read it before I send each issue.
- No advertising, no sponsorships, no affiliate links. The economics of an essay change the second somebody else has paid for it. If the work cannot support itself on reader contributions, then it cannot support itself, and that is information.
- No "ten things" headlines, ever. The form is a confession that the writer either did not have a real argument or did not trust the reader to follow one. Both are insults.
- No paywalls in the middle of an essay. If a subscriber tier is added at some future date, free readers will get the entire piece. Paid will get the back catalogue, the audio version, and the privilege of being on the line for next week's electric bill.
- No AI-generated body copy. I use spell-check, I use a search engine, and I sometimes ask a model to find a missing word I'm circling. The argument and the sentences are written by a person who can be held responsible for them.
- No subtweeting, no quote-tweet dunks, no engagement bait. If a piece responds to somebody else, they are named and quoted in context, and they get the right to reply. The rest is noise that costs the writer their judgment.
Corrections, sources, and the line on opinion
When I am wrong, the correction goes at the top of the piece, in the same font as the body, dated, and signed. I do not edit a paragraph silently and pretend the old one didn't exist. The web version preserves the original text in a footnote so the reader can see exactly what changed and when.
Sources are linked inline. When I cite a study, the link goes to the study, not to the press release about the study. When I cite a municipal document, the link goes to the document, not to the city's blog post about the document. If a source is behind a paywall, I'll say so and quote the relevant passage in the body.
The line between reporting and opinion: I do not pretend to be neutral. Most of what I publish is argumentative essay, drawn from public records and from people I've talked to on background. Where I have done original reporting — a FOIA request, a sit-down interview, a site visit — I will say so at the top of the piece. Where I am working from second-hand sources, I will say that too.
If you are quoted in Field Letter and you believe you were misrepresented, write to me. The first version of the correction will be drafted with you on the email thread.
The reader I write for
When I draft an issue, I am imagining one specific reader. She is in her early forties, lives in a mid-sized American city, works in something adjacent to public policy or design or local journalism, and has about forty minutes on a Sunday morning between the coffee and the rest of the day. She is patient with long sentences and impatient with bad arguments. She does not need me to tell her what to think; she needs me to give her something worth thinking against.
If that's not you, you will probably still get something out of most issues. If it's never you, this is not the right newsletter, and the unsubscribe link works on the first try.
A standing invitation
Disagree with anything on this page in writing. The reply address on every issue is the same address I read, and the smartest things I have published have started as something a reader sent me on a Sunday afternoon. The page above is what I aspire to. The work is what holds me to it.
— Adam Reilly, Oakland, California. Last revised: this draft.