Make Your Resolution Easy
Aemula Writer Spotlight - 1.1.26
Not to be confused with our previous Spotlight, How to See in Full Resolution, this week’s discussion focuses on New Year’s Resolutions.
As to be expected this time of year, many writers are sharing their resolutions with their audiences. It comes as no surprise that a common theme to this year’s resolutions centers on creating a healthier media diet.
With trust in media reaching a new record low, and the inflammatory rhetoric of social media continuing to wear us down, people are turning to alternative sources to discover information to construct their worldviews.
This shift has been characterized by the demand for independent journalism, as seen with the continued rise of Substack, Patreon, and other newsletter services. Many traditional newsrooms, including The New York Times, are even emphasizing more newsletter-style content to align with these trends.
However, it should be alarming that creating a healthier media diet needs to be a resolution. Yes, it takes considerable self-control to avoid the infinitely scrolling slop that plagues most of today’s internet, but it should not be difficult to find credible, trustworthy reporting from independent journalists given the substantial increase in independent content being produced.
Unfortunately, curating your own environment of credible, independent media still feels like a full-time job. Only those who are intent on putting in the work to seek out diverse perspectives from the best writers on each trending news story are able to do this effectively.
Yet, the reward for their time and effort is paying hundreds of dollars each year in subscription fees across dozens of sources. Even if you were to simply subscribe to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to get credible reporting from left and right of center, you would be paying over $750/year while still fighting through banner ads each time you try to read an article.
We believe that it should be easy to improve your media diet.
With a single Aemula subscription, you get unlimited access to all reporting without hitting paywalls at every turn. Receive a personally curated daily front page from independent sources or choose to freely explore diverse perspectives at your leisure so you can understand the full story. You can trust that what you read on Aemula is independently owned, free of outside influence, and curated using open-source, community-governed algorithms. All for just $10/month and completely free of ads.
If your New Year’s Resolution is to take back control of your attention and start a healthier media diet, join Aemula for free today.
To start, all you need is an email, which Aemula doesn’t even store.
This week, we highlight writers discussing how they plan to build a healthier media diet in the new year. We encourage you to explore their work and consider subscribing directly!
Against the Grain
Written by Kelly Johnston, a former food lobbyist, Secretary of the US Senate, congressional staffer, and statehouse journalist, sharing insight at the intersection of politics, policy, and history while encouraging civil discourse.
Also available to read on Aemula!
“Fortunately, a new generation of digital media outlets has emerged to counter the propaganda and woke narrative pushers at these major outlets, who desperately feed the Outrage Machine™ for clicks and relevance, and to protect, if not promote, the sources on which they rely.
(…)
I still subscribe to many mainstream publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ, in particular, I find generally well balanced, and its editorial pages remain a gold standard. Another right-leaning news aggregator I assiduously follow is justthenews.com, created and led by former Washington Post, AP, and The Hill investigative journalist John Solomon. Isaac Saul’s Tangle News and Allsides.com have promise, but lack the breadth of media aggregation featured in Ground News and Straight Arrow News.
But as Ground News documents, the most significant errors in the media might not be bias, but sins of omission - their failure and outright refusal to cover specific stories. One really needs a breadth of sources to get a complete picture.”
Anna Mack’s Stack
Written by Anna Mackenzie, a startup advisor and career mentor whose newsletter draws on a decade of experience across brand building, innovation, and founder support to help creatives and generalists design sustainable, multi-passionate careers beyond the 9–5.
“I, along with the rest of the world, am fatigued by the infinite scroll. Don’t get me wrong, I love lots of writers and creators. But across the internet more and more content feels manufactured purely to capture attention as opposed to providing education or ideas with any real depth, and as an in-recovery phone addict I can unsafely say that this flavour of media diet is not good for the ol’ brain.
There’s a reason that Substack has popped off recently. People are opting out of the rat-race-ery of the FYP and are looking to thoughtful, intentional work that teaches them something or provokes a new perspective. In 2026, I think things will shift away from valuing content that hijacks attention against our will, towards content worth paying attention to.
Intellectually driven, high value content creators with deep trust > viral, trend driven content creators with mass followings.”
midnight crumbs
Written by Hannah Bay, a UK-based writer chronicling late-night reflections on loss, memory, and healing in fragmentary essays that trace the emotional weight of change, grief, and the small rituals that shape who we become.
“what we let in shapes us more than we like to admit. news, social media, television, newsletters, background noise. none of it is neutral, especially when it’s the first thing we meet in the morning or the last thing we absorb at night. an anti-rot agenda doesn’t ask us to unplug from the world. it asks us to choose how we stay connected. that might mean reading the news later in the day instead of waking up to it. opting for written journalism over rolling broadcasts. sprinkling in sources that offer context or genuinely good news, rather than a constant drip of urgency. sometimes it’s as simple as unfollowing accounts that quietly spike anxiety, even if there’s nothing objectively wrong with them.”
Are you writing on Substack? You can easily set up automatic cross-posting with Aemula to instantly:
Increase your earnings
Expand your audience
Verifiably own your work
Plus, you will have opportunities to access community resources and grants to support the content you want to create!
Link your Substack to your Aemula account using this link or send a quick email to writers@aemula.com to get started!
No cost, no obligations, and you can stop at any time.
If you want to support any of the writers we spotlight in our Substack, we highly encourage you to subscribe to their individual publications.
If you want to support independent journalism more broadly, start a subscription on Aemula!
To stay up to speed on platform updates and the writers we are adding to our community, Follow us on X or subscribe to our Substack!
Any writers you want to see featured here? Send them our way! We are always searching for great new publications.
