Weekly curation of longform journalism is difficult and time-consuming—and we have very demanding day jobs. By necessity, we needed to find a way to occasionally take a week off and hand over the SLR’s controls to a guest editor, who brings a fresh eye and perspective to the role. And from the beginning, we hoped the newsletter would be crowd-sourced by journalists (and a few folks outside of journalism) who we admire and trust. We now have more than 100 contributing editors—the list will keep growing—who all will take at least one turn guest-editing the SLR and who make other meaningful contributions behind the scenes. The tradition of our guest editors writing opening essays happened almost by accident; it’s a tradition our readers have come to love.
And Jack Shafer, Politico’s veteran media critic who selects The Classic Read, has been with us from the very first SLR. Jack’s leap of faith and trust in us, when this newsletter was just an idea, is something I’ll always be grateful for. We’ve added outstanding senior editors who offer their weekly picks from the worlds of photography, podcasts, books, fiction, music, magazine covers, comic books, documentaries and more. We couldn’t do this without them. We are so grateful that they contribute every week and help make the SLR special.