Big Changes Coming to this Stack

Two years after founding this Substack, and one year before France's presidential elections, I'm planning on focusing on original reporting and analysis -- and, you guessed it, I need your help.

A scene from this weekend’s May Day protest in Paris.

I’ll admit it, two years ago when I first started this Substack, I didn’t see it as a journalistic opportunity. It was 2024, and Elon Musk had just done something foul — I don’t even remember what. In France, where I live, politics had gone topsy-turvy (remember those snap elections?) In the US, where I’m from, Trump was about to be reelected.

Like many, I was looking for a way out, a new platform for my thoughts.

I didn’t even really understand at the time that Substack was a newsletter service. To me, it was more Blogspot than Mailchimp. More Tumblr than The Times. I started using it accordingly: as a space for personal exploration.

In those early days, Substack allowed me, as a foreign resident of France who had just been naturalized, to process the idea of citizenship at a moment of rising nationalism, and to use my own privilege to speak for others less fortunate than myself.

I titled it Becoming French because that was the niche I wanted to cover: the intersection of Frenchness and belonging. With so many Americans thinking of moving abroad and France being identified as a place that is fundamentally getting it right, I wanted to challenge some oversimplified notions about this country I now call home.

Eight hundred subscribers, 60 newsletters and three paid pledges later (thanks, fam)— I feel like I’ve done good on this mission. I’ve spoken with exiled journalists, experts, and politicians. I’ve brought you to museum exhibits and protests. For a while I put together a weekly round-up of immigration-related news. I published a series on French cities and towns run by the far-right. I’ve also gone in-depth with an interview series on the topic of migration, citizenship and belonging.

Throughout it all, I’ve recognized the tantalizing potential of a newsletter like this, but have also been humbled by the realization of how much work goes into doing it well.

After two years, it was time to take stock.

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Of course, there was something else that forced me to reckon with where I’m at in my Substack journey. I quit my job.

When I launched this newsletter, I was working full-time at Forbidden Stories, a French non-profit dedicated to taking forward the work of threatened journalists. I had a monthly salary and some of the wonderful benefits people love to cite in Substack posts about why Americans are moving to France in record numbers. But I wanted to do more ground reporting, and at Forbidden Stories, that simply wasn’t going to happen.

I took a few months off to reflect. I traveled to the US on the trail of James Baldwin. Then, I cycled across Europe on the trail of my father. In the fall, I went to Chile on the trail of the Communist Party. I wrote my longest story ever — about how I learned I had been born through IVF, for Longreads. Throughout, I continued freelancing from Paris, writing for Jacobin, The Nation, Al Jazeera English, L’Humanité and various other news outlets. I started editing with SOUVENIR Magazine, which is about to drop its second issue at the end of the month.

It wasn’t really until this April that I settled back into my Paris life. My eyes reopened to France, and I started to see stories everywhere. The problem was that a lot of those stories went nowhere — instead of being published, they gathered dust in the deep craters of busy editors’ inboxes. This wasn’t what I left my job for.

Which finally brings me to the Big Changes part of this email.

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Over the next few weeks, I’m planning on revamping this Substack. I have a new name (which will be revealed in a future post), a content distribution plan and — the holy grail — the ability to monetize. I fought the URSSAF and the URSSAF won: I am now a micro-entrepreneur (small business owner) in France — which means I can finally bill foreign clients, and as an extension get paid for my Substack (h/t John B Howard).

First things first: I am most definitely going to keep most of the content free. No — or few — hard pay walls. I will continue the monthly interview series and, starting this Friday, bring back the weekly news round-up. These will remain free to all subscribers. I will also occasionally weigh in on important news stories in France, as they come up.

That said, I am planning to introduce paid subscriptions for the content that takes the most time and effort to produce: deeply researched and reported stories from the ground.

I’ve got pieces in the works on how a student residence has been converted into a clubhouse for the populist far-right; what a cycling trip through the so-called “diagonale du vide” can reveal about the “forgotten” France that’s increasingly drawn to the National Rally; and a profile of a group of journalists in exile who have made Paris their home. I’ll also be doing more collaborative work with other Substackers: Sophie Stuber, for example, will report on one family’s fight for recognition from the French state after a tragic Olympics-related construction accident left their husband and father dead.

Finally: I’m planning to introduce a mixed-media element to this project that I hope might inspire some of you to take the plunge and get in on the ground floor with a subscription. But more on that soon.

One year before France’s critical 2027 presidential elections, I’m taking a bet on the need for in-depth, local reporting from this complicated, beautiful country — and I’m taking a bet on myself. I hope you’ll join me.

A recent Paris watercolor by the author.