I'm not ghosting you! The spirit moved me to leave Substack.

Hey there! Alex Howard here.

If all has gone well, you're reading my first newsletter from Ghost.

If you've been following and reading me for a while, you know this isn't my first email newsletter rodeo.

Back in 2006, when I began writing about technology full-time, I edited and sent a "Word of the Day" email newsletter for WhatIs.com to folks around the world.

I quite enjoyed it – except when challenges around MailChimp got in the way. I'm hoping that using Ghost will make building a direct, healthy relationship with the people formerly known as the audience – YOU – easier than it was almost two decades ago.

I'm also hoping that doing so will lessen my reliance on social media for distribution and connections, building a network that doesn't depend on capricious billionaires and opaque platform governance.

I learned that lesson again this past weekend, when Meta restricted my ability to post on Threads and Instagram for no obvious reason or means to appeal. That experience finally got me off the ball to transition to Ghost from Substack, which had its own rationale and appeal for reasons that don't bear recounting here.

This will be an experiment, like most things I do online. I don't know if I'll be able to earn enough paying subscribers to make it sustainable, much less a living, but I'm committing to sending at least one newsletter a day through the end of 2024.

In return, I promise to always respect your time and to work hard to make this space be worth your attention – and your subscription dollars.

Some newsletters may be short, some may be long. Some may be reported columns, some may be interviews, some may be digests of what I'm reading, some will be essays.

I don't intend to add ads or sponsors unless that makes sense. I do intend to let you know if my work status changes, to ensure you always know where I'm coming from. (As of last September, I'm an independent author whose good governance project spun out from a host nonprofit. Stay tuned.)

I have a lot in my notebooks from the last decade of advocacy on open government, digital democracy, and my continuing work on freedom of information, so you should expect me to begin there.

If you like what you read, I hope you'll share more broadly, since word-of-mouth is paramount in this weird, disrupted media moment.

Thank you for reading! Onwards.