5 Substacks you should be reading (3 with Iowa ties)
Dutch Letters
A Des Moines, Iowa, couple packs up and heads for a life in The Hague, Netherlands. Read about their journey in this fascinating Substack — Dutch Letters. High journalistic quality here, too.
Jeff Bruner, an Iowa journalist who I worked with at the Ames Tribune in the 1990s, and his wife, Stephanie, have a number of posts up already, with the best to come, I think. The Substack: Dutch Letters. Here’s Jeff on the Substack:
We’re moving in January to Den Haag – home of the Dutch royal family, the Dutch Parliament, the International Criminal Court, the Peace Palace, and Girl with a Pearl Earring. (I’ll save the full story of *how* we’re getting to Europe with two pets for another post.)
The Dutch-American Friendship Treaty offers a visa that makes immigration easy for entrepreneurs. (My business, The Fussy Librarian, is 100% online.) If we enjoy it there and decide to stay, we’ll be eligible for EU long-term residency after five years and can then live anywhere in Europe.
A seeming lifetime ago I had the great professional fortune of working for two years at the Ames Tribune in a wonderfully crowded newsroom. Yes, "crowded" and "newsroom" paired. Jeff Bruner and I shared a space and he became a good friend, so good in fact, that he felt comfortable enough to test the connection by asking me to help move a washer and dryer his new Ames home. We also watched the O.J. white bronco chase down a Los Angeles freeway on TV as the iconic 90s moment interrupted our NBA game one Friday night.
JFK Facts
One of the more defining comments on Iowa comes from the journalist Ty Rushing of Iowa Starting Line.
"There's always an Iowa connection," he says.
So true. And such is the case with JFK Facts.
The Substack, focusing on the Kennedy Assassination, is a breakout hit, drawing a large subscriber base. It's operated by former Washington Post journalist Jefferson Morley who for a time edited me and other Hawkeye State writers as he helped lead The Iowa Independent about 15 years ago. Morley has good friends in my hometown of Carroll, Iowa.
Morley has incorporated a riveting podcast into JFK Facts and publishes prolifically.
A highlight: a recent interview for a podcast (posted through the JFK Facts Substack) with filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner on his "Who Killed JFK?" podcast with Soledad O'Brien.
Based In Lafayette, Indiana
One model to emerge from the tumult, the upside-down world, of community journalism, is what by many measures has to be among the best use of Substack for local journalism — Based In Lafayette, Indiana, from Dave Bangert, a long-time former newspaperman.
I have no connection to Lafayette -- other than I have cousins living there -- and I have toured the Tippecanoe Battlefield as the Native American leader Tecumseh is a hero.
Bangert does extraordinary work reporting from a city he knows well.
Moreover, he's ingeniously figured out a way for Substackers to include sponsoring ads atop their work — a break-the-boundaries strategy.
More journalists should follow Dave Bangert’s approach. It might be just what democracy ordered …
notes from the trail
The most fully present person I've met is Troy Hogan, a Carroll native and University of Iowa alum who works from Iowa City for Starbucks.
Troy is an avid hiker and talented poet. He's also able to handle a camera. All of this adds up to highly readable and soul-lifting Substack column he calls notes from the Trail.
It's heavy on Iowa hiking and our state's landscapes as Troy moved back recently from Washington State to be closer to family. But mine his Substack and you'll find great stories from the American Northwest.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
The model for Substack at its best is the wide-ranging, provocative and relentlessly readable Kareem Abdul-Jabbar feed. His is a curious mind with a rare reach. I look forward to receiving it in my inbox. The topics range from the political to cultural to, of course, sports from the former NBA star and pioneering activist.
(Douglas Burns, a fourth-generation Iowa journalist, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. He is based in Carroll, Iowa.)