The Future of Mystery Paper

As time goes on, Mystery Paper has ballooned in scope and depth (not in a bad way), and each episode appears to be taking longer and longer to produce. As a one-man-band, with the bulk of my time going into my regular work and other task, the 1-2 hours I set aside daily for Mystery Paper goes by quick.

Often I’ll barely get through reading and annotating 5 pages of legislation or documentation on my tablet before the one-hour buzzer goes off and I have to get into something else. Also, the footnotes or references of those 5 pages will often lead to new suspicious documents or rabbit holes, and so the research process alone – while always interesting – can feel like it has no end in sight.

I have no intention of stopping (I feel like this is going to be something I’m working on for a long time), but I’ve been working to come up with a way to deliver some kind of content to interested people on a more regular basis, which doesn’t a) suck too much time away from me producing the actual series and b) doesn’t ‘give away’ or ruin the impact of the actual episodes as they arrive.

My current solutions are twofold:

1. I publish short somewhat-frequent blog posts of ‘interesting nuggets’ from my research process. The idea is that these are somewhat unrefined reactions/observations to things I encounter which I find to be interesting/suspicious and would ordinarily otherwise just send to a few interested friends on whatsapp or telegram. These will likely not be big bold well-researched claims, but just suspicious contradictions in the official narrative which I’ve encountered along the way. Ideally these will not be ‘spoilers’ for the major ‘plot twists’ of the eventual episodes, but rather interesting tidbits which interested viewers might appreciate in the interim between episodes.
2. I intermittently release some (very) short stand-alone videos which explain certain concepts in a share-able way. The Mystery Paper series is already somewhat modular in structure (by design) but the idea of these would be that I can script and produce some short explanatory videos (e.g. a minute or two) that might later find their way into an episode structure, but for now at least allow me to get out some more content and play with editorial and animation techniques and not be stuck for months and months in a perpetual research cycle. Content-wise I’d have to be careful about what topics I exactly focus on for these, because any seemingly small subject can always expand and connect to a million other things and become a feature-doc in their own right.

My questions for you (if you are subscribed to the email mailing list) are:

1. Would you like to be notified by email for either of these types of updates, or only for the full episodes as they are released? I want to be sensitive to peoples’ inboxes and so I can start a new RSS feed or mailing list for these kinds of updates if that is preferable.
2. Are there any particular topics or ideas that you find confusing (either for yourself, or that you struggle to explain to others) that a short stand-alone video would be useful. I obviously can’t take requests on this but it would be useful for my reference in deciding what to focus on and put effort into. Again, my goal here is not to be providing debt relief solutions and get embroiled in peoples’ specific cases, but rather to provide material to help people understand these topics on a foundational level.

Please feel free to comment or share your thoughts or opinions via email on anything here, since it’s useful for me to know what is most interesting or valuable to people. I should note that my goal here is not to provide short term ‘financial solutions’ for those who are dealing with mortgage/debt/court concerns, but rather to produce solid and credible content that can help people build a strong base of understanding of where and who we are in the context of this system/world/whatever-it-is which we find ourselves in.

Alex