Building Alpenglow Journal: going all-in on Substack

I'm no Substack evangelist, but sometimes you've just got to go where the readers are.

Have you noticed a few changes around here?

Practical updates first, followed by delving a bit deeper into the weeds.

This publication's overall name is now Alpenglow Journal. I wrote a very popular piece last year introducing the idea, and while I've since decided to move more slowly and conserve energy, the basic concept still stands. For more, scroll down to 'About Alpenglow Journal' below.

Unplugged is now the name of the biweekly regular newsletter published by the journal alongside other pieces.

I'm testing out a new publishing schedule:

• Entries are sent every week, 8pm Tuesdays UK time. No more 'I'll send it when it's ready' vagueness. I aim to be consistent!

• Every other week will be an issue of Unplugged in the format you know and love, focusing mainly on what I've been creating and reading. I'll continue to tweak and improve this format.

• For the weeks in between, I'll be posting long-form pieces. Some, such as the recent 'Freezeframe', are stories about adventure. Others will be opinion pieces or how-to guides.

This won't be the last time I change the schedule, but I think this should work well for the foreseeable future.

I will, effective after this update, stop cross-posting everything on alexroddie.com as well as Substack. For more on this decision, which I haven't come to lightly, please scroll down to the 'Why go all-in on Substack?' section below.

The newsletter hosted on alexroddie.com will revert to a brief and occasional (no more than monthly at most) email newsletter focused strictly on professional updates: book launches, major article publications, talk announcements etc. I will be focusing my creative energies on Alpenglow Journal from now on.

Another benefit of this is that there's now a single, simple and obvious place to sign up if you just want these updates about my work. That's here.

Here's what will happen for existing subscribers:

• If you're a subscriber on alexroddie.com: You will remain subscribed to the occasional Alex Roddie newsletter described above. Additionally, at some point in the next two weeks I will add your email address to the Alpenglow Journal mailing list on Substack (don't worry, you don't need to sign up to Substack or do anything). If you don't want me to add you, please let me know, but I'd encourage you to come along – I'll be posting exactly the same kind of work I've been posting on my main blog for the last few months, so you've already chosen to receive these emails! And remember, you can always unsubscribe to either newsletter any time you want.

• If you're a subscriber on Substack: You don't need to do anything.

At some point, as I've always been transparent about, I will be paywalling some posts and building a strategy for paid membership. Currently, all entries will be going out free to all subscribers, paid membership is entirely optional, and that will remain the case for at least six months... likely a year or more. Right now it's more important for me to build a community.

I'm working on a logo. Eventually it will be a wood engraving, but currently it's a digital painting based on an ink sketch. I've created a big version as well as a tiny icon version. The wordmark is based on the typeface Albertus Nova.

When I get around to it, the URL for the Substack publication will be permanently moving to alpenglowjournal.com (right now I have a redirect set up pointing to alexroddie.substack.com).

About Alpenglow Journal

You can read a preliminary manifesto on the journal's about page. To summarise:

Elevating human creativity and purpose through adventure. A journal of outdoor and nature writing, photography, analogue counterculture, literature and art.

[...] Alpenglow Journal is an attempt to trace the connections between many things – not just the great outdoors but also tech, philosophy, environment, futurism, and both written and visual arts.

The modern world – the machine – seeks to atomise and control us. How can the embodied craft of adventure make us whole and free again?

As I've written before, alpenglow illuminates and clarifies in the darkness; it brings grace, art, motion. It's also ephemeral and delicate, its meaning interpreted by the observer in that moment, and therefore is intensely human. I can’t think of a better symbol for our new and growing counterculture.

One of my goals for 2025 is to make Alpenglow Journal the preferred home for my most personal adventure and outdoor writing. Increasingly, what I want to write exists in a weird cross-genre space that doesn't feel like a great fit for any of the existing print adventure magazines – at least not the ones I have an existing relationship with.

They're all doing great work, important work, that I believe in passionately. My support for them is not going to waver. Neither is my unswerving belief in print media. But there is so much I want to explore, so many ideas I want to pursue – and I'm starting to connect with others who think the way I do, who see the gossamer threads connecting wide-ranging subjects. Who are building our new counterculture in adventure.

I want a space where I can explore these threads. Where I can write about ultralight backpacking and wood engraving, about film photography and science fiction, about buy-it-for-life products and resistance to AI, about solastalgia and traditional mountain craft, about keeping a commonplace book and learning about wild food, about breaking smartphones and the future of art... and why these apparently divergent things are all intensely entangled.

This means far more original work being published on Substack, exclusively for my subscribers and focused on the ideas and principles I want to explore. It won't necessarily mean less of my more conventional work published elsewhere.

For an early example of this kind of work, read 'Something in the darkness to believe in'.

Why go all-in on Substack?

When I launched Unplugged less than five months ago, I reasoned out my decision to cross-post everything on Substack as well as on my main blog. I thought this would be the best choice for my readers as well as the simplest for me.

However, I started to realise almost right away that this was just causing more confusion. I was surprised to see an overwhelming preference: many people cancelled the alexroddie.com subscription and resubscribed on Substack.

I realised that I need to just pick one place for Alpenglow Journal and run with it.

I remain very cautious about Substack, and certainly don't think it's a perfect platform. Despite some people claiming that it's somehow separate from social media, to me it's obvious: Substack is social media. Yes it is currently less evil than the Meta/X world, largely thanks to the platform incentives and business model, but for how long? Ultimately, enshittification is only a matter of time when it comes to a closed VC-backed platform. I'm under no illusions about that. Matt Barr posted a worthwhile thread about this recently.

I actually think that Ghost, which alexroddie.com is hosted with, is the superior platform when it comes to the reading experience. And in an ideal world I would prefer to build on the open web, in a space I own 100%. But the fact is that Substack is very obviously where my readers are – as well as the audience growth. The evidence is pretty clear at this point.

I'm aware that such arguments can be made for building on Meta/X as well – platforms I have left due to personal ethical reasons. I think this goes to show how complex all this is! Yes I'd love for this new renaissance in personal publishing to be rooted in the classical open web (we've always had the tools, after all), but I suppose there comes a point when we've got to make an acceptable compromise and meet our readers where they are. For now, that's Substack – and honestly I feel more positive about it now than I did six months ago.

My current thinking is that the journal will remain on Substack for a substantial period in order to grow the community and find new readers. I can always move it to Ghost in a year or five years if I need to.

As always, I'll be as transparent as possible, and I won't always get everything right, but I'm in this for the long haul and eventually I want this to be so much more than a personal newsletter or blog.