Where The Lede Gets Buried

My last post, on Gumroad, took a very leisurely path to its primary point, and some people were wondering why. I think it’s worth explaining my strategy on that.

First off, let me say: Tedium is a newsletter first and foremost, even though most of our readers hit it on the Web these days. We intentionally write long about things, in a very casual way, where we over-think small details. It’s what we are. And sometimes that leads us in fun directions.

However, we’re in a moment where even news junkies have tuned a lot of stuff out, because things have gotten that bad. In the case of the Gumroad piece, it would have just been easy to say, “Hey, read this Wired piece” and be done with it. But that ultimately is not what Tedium is. Consider the end users who actually use Gumroad—they are not necessarily reading every Wired story. They’re often just trying to create things, and they might have missed it because their creator circles don’t necessarily land on Wired stories.

I’m not saying I presented my POV perfectly, but my goal was to hit them on their level. And the post did well, and reached those people. So yeah, I think that my unusual way of presenting that information kind of worked, oddly enough.

Look, I’m not saying that I have a particularly amazing lane to navigate the current news cycle, but I’ve been trying to find ways to do it here and there. And one of those ways over the past few weeks has to tie my esoteric topic choices into modern conversations in unusual ways.

I’m sure I’m the only person who made the connection between J.D. Vance and Richie Cunningham’s extended stay in Greenland. And as tariff coverage goes, my choice of hiding it in a story on snap fasteners probably was a bit of an avant-garde choice.

But the thing is, there is value to the roundabout road, to the not-quite-direct way of touching on a topic. Especially right now when people are overwhelmed by stuff that gets straight to a hard-to-swallow point.

There’s this phrase in journalistic circles called “burying the lede,” which discusses what happens when you write a piece, and you don’t directly get to the story’s point. As a J-school graduate, I know this phrase quite well. But newsletters are not places you necessarily go to for ledes—and Tedium is very much an attempt to embrace that freedom. I built this as a contrarian thing—and one of the things it runs contrary to is the idea that you need to throw everything in an inverted pyramid.

For years, I intentionally did not make it easy for readers to figure out what I was going to write about until they actually opened the email. It was a strategy: If I make it less clear what I’m doing and instead take the reader on a journey where we’re trying to understand this weird thing together, they might really get into that.

So yeah, the drive-by-reader who’s never stumbled on my site before might not love it. But that’s OK. There are a lot of people out there, and I don’t have to please all of them. But maybe some of them might find my rants on cheese curls and messenger bags that sometimes touch on deeper issues to be interesting.

And hey, sometimes digesting an overwhelming lede just isn’t what you’re in the mood for.