Welcome back to Chortle!

I'm making a few changes.

Hey folks!

Happy belated New Year from your good friends here at Chortle—namely, me! For anyone who subscribed in the last few weeks or months, allow me to reintroduce myself. I’m Greg Nix, the founder and editor of this newsletter. In the last 18 months, Chortle has published 400 humor pieces written by me or one of 69 outside contributors (nice) who submitted their work via open call.

BUT THAT’S ALL ABOUT TO CHANGE… sort of.

The truth is that operating a daily humor newsletter grew increasingly difficult for me over the second half of 2025. There are a few different underlying reasons that I’ll get into, but the tl;dr conclusion is that Chortle hasn’t been making enough money to keep operating as we have. As a result, I’ve decided to cut our publishing schedule down to three posts per week.

This was a tough decision, but I think it’s in the best interests of our readers (and, not insignificantly, me as a person). I want to ensure the people who choose to pay for this newsletter receive something hilarious every time they open one of our emails. That's the promise I feel like I’ve made them. But by publishing a piece every weekday, I’ve also been feeling stretched too thin to keep delivering on that promise.

Let me be clear that I don’t think we’ve ever published anything bad (or, if we have, it was written by me 🙃). But as the year wound down, I found myself stuck in a gradually degrading work loop that looked something like this:

• Step one: Chortle isn’t making enough money, so I take a copywriting gig.

• Step two: I have less time to write pieces for Chortle, so I need more guest writers.

• Step three: I need to pay the guest writers, so Chortle makes less money.¹

• Step four: REPEAT!

American political circumstances² haven’t made this process any easier. Turns out it’s not as fun to create comedy every single day when your brain has to first cross off ideas like “10 People I Wish Were Dead.” (Leave your guesses in the comments!)

Another interesting wrinkle, and one that I didn’t necessarily expect as a chronic self-deprecator, is that oftentimes what our paid subscribers want most is… my writing. That’s what their direct feedback says, and the reader engagement metrics generally agree. As I’ve learned more about newsletters as an industry, this makes sense. The publications that thrive tend to be driven by a singular voice. I guess, generally speaking, people prefer to know exactly who’s showing up in their inbox. So the fact that reading and editing submissions takes up time I could otherwise spend writing also began to seem like an obstacle to overall success.

This is all a long way of saying that the other change you’ll notice going forward is more pieces written by me. In fact, most weeks I’ll write all three posts. I still intend to publish other writers, particularly since I’m now connected with many talented people in the internet humor-verse. But I’m implementing a more targeted submission process that I think will produce funnier, more compelling pieces and will be delivered in a different cadence (think Theme Weeks or Monthly Series).³ Stay tuned.

If you read this far, you're either genuinely interested in Chortle or procrastinating spectacularly at work. Either way, thanks. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who reads, as well as to the hundreds of writers who have submitted, so I wanted to be transparent about my thought-process here.

The new Chortle launches Monday, January 12th! Whether you’re reading for the first time or you’ve been here since Day 1, I hope you stick around as I plot this new direction. I really believe the best is yet to come.

(For this newsletter. Not for the world, obviously. We’re so screwed.)

1. Sadly, I’m not even paying these folks particularly well!

2. How’s that for a euphemism?

3. I’m also anticipating the schedule change will leave me with more time and creative energy for Chortle-adjacent projects like books and podcasts.