Unplugged #1: Building Alpenglow Journal: putting the idea on ice, and where I'm going from here

Conserving energy and being realistic about what I can achieve

Hello Substack subscribers! The Pinnacle is now Unplugged… and I’m making a few more changes. To learn more, please read on.

Back in May, I published a post about a reboot of The Pinnacle, and then followed it up in June with some more solid plans. My stated goal was to launch a new publication called Alpenglow Journal. Here's an update for you. How has the project evolved, and where am I going from here?

First of all, I apologise for all the confusion as I've experimented with different approaches, publishing some stuff on here and some on Substack. I can appreciate that it's been tricky to follow. But I've arrived at a solution now, and I'd like to share it with you today.

What's happened?

In my original post, I mentioned that I hoped to launch in July. It's now December, and no launch has taken place. There are a few reasons for this.

Only the day after my last update on the project, I flew to Morocco to take part in a trek in the Atlas Mountains. After getting back I found my work schedule at capacity. This is good! But I have a bad habit of thinking 'just one more'. This time I did the right thing and recognised that I couldn't add anything else.

Secondly, after my original posts went live I had a few conversations with friends and colleagues that made me realise I'd been too hasty. One factor I hadn't anticipated is that my plans could create conflicts of interest. Especially given this:

It will steer clear of the outdoor industry as we know it: the exhausting, consumerism-saturated, Instagram-friendly online content machine. I can’t promise a total break from this world, because I work there and so do many other outdoor creative professionals, but I can promise something different.

I still aspire to do this – and I think it's urgently needed. But the key bit is in the quote above. For better or worse, much as I want to reform this world, I earn my living there. I can't just go in all guns blazing. This has always been a bad habit of mine. Ideas bombard me all the time, and I tend to jump into new things with enthusiasm before I've really considered consequences and implications. Too often I can be idealistic rather than practical. It's better than not having any ideas at all, I suppose, but from time to time it has led to awkwardness as I've had to backpedal.

Obviously, it was never my intention to attack publications and people I work with... and, just to make things very clear at this point, these conversations never went beyond a friendly but cautious word to learn more about my intentions. But the fact that these conversations even happened was enough to give me pause. The outdoor industry is fragile enough as it is, and the last thing I want to do is cause damage.

A theme I've seen cropping up in a few unrelated conversations lately is the need to move slow and conserve energy. So that's what I've been doing these last few months while I think it over and consider what I actually want to do – and what I can actually achieve given my limited time.

The new plan

Let's keep things simple, shall we? Both for my sake and for you, my dear (and probably confused) reader.

The print journal

Launching a new print journal is not realistic for me at the moment. However, I do love my original idea for Alpenglow Journal, and if circumstances change at some point in the future then I'll bring it back to life. So it's being put on ice.

A single unified digital publication, cross-posted on alexroddie.com and Substack

Back when I published my weekly Pinnacle Newsletter, I always used to struggle with what to publish in the newsletter and what to publish on my blog. And as I've worked through ideas for this new thing, I've struggled with how to distinguish my existing blog (alexroddie.com) with the online component of Alpenglow Journal.

My original plan was for my Substack page to be a new newsletter and online publication that would eventually support Alpenglow Journal. For the last few months I've been dipping my toes into Substack, lurking and experimenting, posting the occasional item on there. But, again, I've struggled to distinguish the two entities. Eventually I realised that any such distinction is always going to be artificial.

So here's the plan:

1. My existing blog will expand to include all this stuff. Most of my personal writing now is about the fuzzy intersection of adventure, outdoor experience, writing, photography, books, art, analogue counterculture, disconnection, big tech resistance, and related philosophy. So, rather than trying to erect false barriers between 'Alex stuff' and 'stuff that I should be putting on this other platform', it's all going into one bucket. I've sensed a sea change in the last couple of years about personal writing online, anyway – people respond well to a strong personal voice. So why hide that under a publication name? Why not just embrace the personal point of view? After all, I'm not fooling anyone here – this is a one-person operation, not a publication with a team of writers. So let's keep things real.

2. I've relaunched the weekly(ish) newsletter under the name Unplugged. Here's issue #1. This will be published roughly weekly, and include a round-up of recently published posts in addition to all the other interesting bits and pieces I've found over the week. Subscribers will receive this newsletter, plus regular posts, by email.

3. I will be cross-posting all content to both alexroddie.com and Substack. I've thought carefully about what to do with my Substack account. I could just mothball it and move entirely back to alexroddie.com, but the fact is that I have 850 readers on Substack. Although I have some issues with Susbtack as a platform, it's fantastic for growth and discovery. The community there is thriving. So, again in the spirit of putting everything in a single bucket for simplicity and sustainability, I will just cross-post everything between the two platforms. People can subscribe to whichever platform they want. Simple!

In Unplugged #1, I stated that less significant posts would not be sent out to subscribers by email. However, as soon as I implemented this I realised it would cause headaches of its own. So I'm just going to keep the volume of posts at a reasonable one or two per week, and space things out by scheduling. Less significant updates that don't justify an entire post of their own will simply be included in editions of Unplugged (e.g. as a paragraph under a heading).

Payments

All content will remain free on both platforms, but I have introduced an entirely optional payment tier at £5/month or £50/year. This is active on both platforms. People can sign up to this if they want to support me, but there are no additional benefits. There's also my tip jar if you want to drop me a few quid just to say thanks (and thank you to all my readers who have already used this – it's appreciated).

In the future I may decide to put a paywall on some of the posts on Substack. However, everything will always remain 100% free on alexroddie.com.

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I hope this system will be sustainable for me, still give me the freedom to explore the topics I want to explore, while being flexible enough for readers. If in time it grows to encompass more of what I originally envisaged for Alpenglow Journal, that's great – but I'm not going to put pressure on myself.

Again, apologies for all the back and forth. What can I say? I learn by doing! If I can do better or if you have any other feedback, please let me know, and thank you as ever for reading and supporting.