Taking stock (and taking your feedback) one year after launching on Substack

Thanks for joining me on this journey!

One year ago, after losing other funding sources, I chose Substack as the distribution vehicle and readers as the funding source for Statistical insights on the arts. (For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been publishing these insights in some form for almost 21 years.)

June is “free month”. Thanks to my paid subscribers, all four posts this month will be free. If you’d like to join them — and support vital research into the arts, you can do so here.

So, where are we now?

This week, I’m talking about discoveries made (both good and bad) over the past year. Next week, I’ll offer thoughts on gaps, as well as the specificity and coverage of the data sources covered over the year. (As often happens, the two posts started out as one but quickly became much too long.)

Before diving in, I’d like to thank you for joining me over the past year. Without readers, a newsletter becomes a writing exercise, which is not what I’m looking for at this point in my career.

Special thanks go out to my paid subscribers. Without you, today’s post would be about discontinuing this service, which is not the type of year-in-review I would have hoped for.

While I provide my summary below, I’d love to hear your thoughts. What have you particularly liked or disliked about the content offered by Statistical insights on the arts? Is there anything else that you’d like to see?

To post a comment on the web version of this newsletter, you can use the button below. Or you can reply to the email version if you'd prefer to keep the conversation private.

---

59 posts since June of 2022

Wow. 59 posts. That’s a lot of writing, and a lot of analysis. Good thing that I enjoy both of those tasks.

I’ve covered a pretty wide range of topics, which I’ve captured with tags that you can find across the top of my homepage, statsinsights.ca

• Artists

• Cultural workers

• Equity

• Cultural organizations

• Performing arts

• Visual arts

• Heritage

• Provinces (including local data)

• Impacts

In those 59 posts, there have been many positive findings about the arts and culture sector, and many challenging ones as well.

There are gaps, of course, both in the range of topics and data availability within them. More on those next week.

---

A few highlights

That’s the big picture view. Any favourites so far?

I’m going to talk more about your favourites than my own, although yours and mine are fairly closely aligned.

I pay close attention to two main indicators of your interest: the number of likes that each post gets and the number of new subscribers (paid and free) after each post.

Here are some posts that generated your likes and subscriptions.

The most liked post so far was a rare glimpse at environmental stats in the sector …

My posts on job vacancies appear to have generated a lot of interest, judging by the new subscriptions afterwards.

I have updated the job vacancy statistics almost every quarter, based on the level of interest. Here is the most recent one.

---

My final example comes from the series of posts I did on the wages of employees in the arts and culture, based on the Labour Force Survey. These posts generated a lot of likes and a number of comments (online and via social media).

Here is my post on the wages of employees classified as professionals in each province. (Have a look at my methods post for a description of the categories: professional, technical, and group #3.)

---

Next week: Challenges and improvements

Next Tuesday, I’ll talk about challenges so far. I’ll also assess the sources used to date, in terms of their cultural content and coverage of the sector. Until then, have a great week.