2024: A Year in Metropolitan

The last 12 months in review

Merry Christmas, you ol’ Gen X cultural review newsletter!

A year in the life

2024 was mostly like 2023, as far as The Metropolitan was concerned. Until November, we were averaging around one or two new sign-ups a week. This placed us in a sort of strivers’ grey area, in which we were both grateful (for all of our existing subscribers, and for the new ones) and frustrated (that the numbers weren’t higher). We’ve been aiming at 1000 subscribers since we started three years ago and we are <rends garments> still not quite there (although this time next year, Rodney…)

Substack — the whole business, not our tiny corner of it — seemed to enter a new phase over the last year or so. It’s now a settled, if relatively small, part of the global online media landscape. And like all established networks, it has gigantic and mid-sized stars around which others tend to fall into orbit; top journalists who have left big newspapers and magazines, authors and influencers who bring huge audiences with them. This is all a sign of success for Substack itself, and we’re glad about that, because from the start we liked the things Substack set out to do.

It has, though, placed us in the position of those needy friends you make in the first term at school who keep smiling at you in the canteen after you’ve made newer, better friends. Because we were relatively early adopters, Substack-wise, we benefited at first from a lot of friendly help and attention from the folk at Substack HQ, but that has fallen away a bit this year as the network has grown and other writers have entered the stratosphere. We’re not actually complaining about this; it’s all entirely fair and above board. But Substack no longer has the feel of a scrappy start-up, and scrappy little newsletters like ours must make their own way.

All of which, honestly, has meant that at times we’ve been unsure about whether to carry on, and rather desperate for a bump of some sort. Which, thankfully but entirely mysteriously, arrived in November, when the rate of likes and subscribes suddenly increased dramatically. We still haven’t worked out what happened — Substack’s analytics are deeply occult — but if you shared a piece around that time, or are a new subscriber, thank you. You’ve made two lazy old people much less grumpy. (If you are a new subscriber, it’d be great to hear how you found us and what made you sign up, so we can do it again.)

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New Year, New Metropolitan

Obviously not. The one thing that can be depended on with New Year’s Resolutions is that they will turn irresolute.

Last year, for example, we swore that we would start a podcast, which, to be fair, we did. But now we’re going back to not doing that again.. Not many people seem to think this was a good idea, at least not enough of one to listen to it regularly, so it is probably going to go into indefinite hiatus on a farm in the country where it can chunter away to all the other abandoned podcasts. Even as just recordings of past essays, it takes a while to record and produce, so it might have to wait until we have a good use for it.

One of our other resolutions, though, was to do more paid content, which has become our ‘Seasons’ format, beginning with our watch-along of Aaron Sorkin’s oeuvre. This, we are going to continue, not least because we’ve still got loads of Sorkin to watch and because Tobias has been promised that we can do Sherlock Holmes next and he’s not going to let anyone wriggle out of that one.

There are going to be a couple of tweaks there, though. So far these pieces have been entirely behind the paywall, but we’re going to start previewing them for free subscribers. We’re also going to shift the release days. Up til now they’ve been going out on Sundays but we’re going to shift them to mid-week, so people aren’t getting a massive flurry of mails at the end of every month.

In fact, we’re going to try doing a few more mid-week emails, probably just the ‘squib’ pieces that go out as part of the month end ‘Mixtapes’. We get the impression that ‘little and often’ works well for the Substack model.

Metropolitan Wrapped

The most popular posts this year were:

Freaks and Geeks (2.18k views) - Uncomfortable lessons from the social media moderation trenches

Endeavour (1.28k) - A weird little game of cultural hide-and-seek hidden inside the cosy Morse prequel

Better than it needs to be (1.25k) - The disappointing nature of ‘that’ll do’ entertainment

How we got here (1.14k) - Tess Dixon on the evolution of social media and its questionable impact on our culture

The Glorious Revolution (961) - The strange wonder of British General Elections

1986: Graceland (926) - Tobias relistens to Paul Simon’s album and discovers he still really loves it

Adam Buxton is not my friend (913) - A slightly creepy parasocial relationship with Dr Buckles

The Wasp Factory (868) - Re-reading Iain Banks’ ‘90s hit novel and realising that Iain M. Banks is a much better writer

The trouble with good girls (863) - Mild-mannered struggles

The art of the payoff (846) - Kicking off our Aaron Sorkin season with an in-depth look at his script for The Social Network

Incidentally, the monthly playlist with the most saves on Spotify is November’s Christmas selection. Quite right, too.

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Thank you

To all of you, but especially the indefatigable likers, commenters and restackers, including (but not restricted to, of course), Oliver Johnson, Luke Honey, Rachael Williams and Whitney McKnight; Lou Tilsley, Emily F. Popek, Richard Ashcroft, Becoming an Author ✍ By Hayley Dunlop (who really is about to be a published author!) Victualis, Penny Kiley (who writes a Substack about ‘80s indie music that a lot of you might well like), Lou Barrett, Harry Freedman (who writes a really interesting Substack about Jewish history), Лариса Шемтова, k8simpson, Carol Gee, and Emma Burnell whose podcast ‘The Zeitgeist Tapes’ is very much in our ballpark.

A special, slobbering, drawn-out ‘thanks’ to Tess Dixon and Jon Millington for writing for us this year and saving our tiny typing fingers.

And to the largely-offline extended Metropolitan family, who help out, say nice things over drinks and make requests in person: Pete Wolf, Annette Richardson, Chris Waywell, Finbar Hawkins, Lucy Thomas, Adam Goodfellow, Ross Sleight, Adam Frost, Kate Williams, Margaret Fiedler MacGinnis, Simon Stephens and Polly Heath.

And to actual family, who read it all and say absolutely nothing: Morgan, Bella, Pippa, Jon and Caroline.

No thanks at all to Billy, who is at best a distraction, and at worst an encumbrance wrapped in a fur coat wrapped in a thick layer of mud; but somehow also a very handsome, companionable and above all good boy.

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If you haven’t read it yes, can we recommend our most popular post this year?