"A note to readers."

A year's publication draws near.

25 OCTOBER—As The Scrum prepares to mark its first anniversary as an independent publication on Substack, we look back with measured satisfaction (though no hint of complacency) and forward to another year of work readers will find worthwhile. We plan improvements of various kinds (always room for them), and we hope you will take note of these. We also want to move The Scrum toward becoming a self-sustaining publication.

In this last connection, and after some uncertainty as to the right moment, we will shortly establish a pay wall. It will work this way:

⁋ Our subscription structure will remain as it is: Readers can subscribe for $5.00 a month or, to make a 20% saving, $50 a year. This will not change.

⁋ We note that other Substack publications offer some pieces or webcasts—those considered most in the public interest—free of charge. We will adopt this practice.

⁋ In other cases, we will make available the top of a given piece and ask readers to subscribe if they wish to read the whole.

⁋ For those who have been good enough to take out paid subscriptions over the past year, we take this chance to thank you and advise that nothing will change. This also applies to those who, for one or another reason (usually some other form of support), are listed in our circulation logs as subscribers.

To a certain extent The Scrum has been a matter of wet cement this past year. While we are no longer feeling our way as we were at the outset, this will continue: We see virtue in remaining open to new ways at things.

Our mix of work will remain fluid, then. We’ll continue publishing commentaries on recent events—pieces “on the news,” as newspaper people say—along with discursive essays and multipart series to accommodate broader subjects and longer considerations of intellectual currents. In addition, we propose to bring in some outside writers on a highly selective basis.

While The Scrum’s focus will remain politics, policy, and political economy, from time to time and when we think the occasion merits it, we will wander into literary or cultural topics.

There is a price to pay for independence, we have paid it in various ways, we will continue to pay it, and in our current environment we would not have it any other way. “All that’s gold doesn’t shine.”

As we send out this note, I should mention we are about to begin publishing an essay on the Julian Assange case that we think plunges as deeply as anything yet written into its implications for our press, our societies, and our futures altogether. This will be in multiple parts.

We are always, always interested in hearing from readers. And we hope you will join us as subscribers if you have not already.

Gratitude, best wishes.

—— Patrick Lawrence for The Scrum,

Norfolk, Conn.