So What Exactly Are We Building Here?

It’s October, which means September’s Back Indie Media Drive is over. But I promised a payoff from the “behind-the-scenes” series on building and running Kineticist.

I thought that payoff might come in the form of revisiting the manifesto I wrote in 2022. Turns out the original vision still holds up, even if it needs some tweaking. So instead of writing a whole new vision document, I’m sharing some of the lessons learned over the past few years and what we’re building towards with your support.

If you need to catch yourself up on the thread that I’ve been exploring this month, read about the identity crisis of calling myself a journalist, and what it takes to actually run this operation.

In no particular order.

If nothing else, you probably know how to pronounce Kineticist now. You likely recognize the colors and know we’re something more than a run-of-the-mill hobby blog. Carving this out took years of deliberate effort and planning. But we have it, and it’s part of the foundation we can build from.

Without a doubt, buying TWIP accelerated our reach and was a fast track to foundational scale. But it also meant inheriting all the weird assumptions, old expectations, and community grudges that came with it. Kineticist was on this trajectory before TWIP. Would we have been better served by passing on the opportunity? Maybe. It took years to get the two entities aligned under a single vision, with proper audience expectations, and it almost took me out of the hobby in the process.

The Roger Sharpe action figure, ticketed events, and various side experiments (anyone remember PinballJobs.com?) were all fun and useful learning exercises, but every hour I spent there was an hour I wasn’t spending working on our core business. While some of these things do have a place in our mix, their place makes more sense when you have a team of ten, not a team of one.

It takes years to build trust and credibility, particularly in the pinball industry, and it can be lost in one quick misstep. That’s one of the reasons we’re pushing harder to define and document our ethics and communicate transparently.

It’s a running joke in the community, but pinball is really hard. It’s a smaller community than you think, and building a sustainable media company within it is a Herculean task. Hard doesn’t mean impossible, of course, but it does set some of the parameters we have to work within.

This is not the first time this thought has occurred to me, but it’s the first time I’ve felt it with such defined clarity—a complete alignment of spirit and vision.

Kineticist is a media company first and foremost. It’s not an app, not a merch line, or a collectibles shop. Content and community are our core products, and everything else must align with and support them, serving our readers and members.

Sponsors and ads helped us get here, and I’m grateful for that kind of assistance, but it’s not an ideal long-term fit for us. Chasing advertising as a revenue source means building and maintaining an advertising product. It also means potentially compromising our editorial independence while introducing a variety of ethical conundrums. The best way forward, if possible, is to build on a base of reader support.

The long-term goal is a cooperative, employee-owned structure, where the people doing the work share in the success and have a say in how the company is run. There are several successful upstart media organizations to model ourselves after, and it’s a structure I’ve explored in other ventures. No phantom equity shares that don’t materialize or bonuses that don’t get paid out. Just a team with real ownership and real agency.

We don’t need to overcomplicate this, but we can look at established ethics rules by organizations like the Society of Professional Journalists for guidance. Things like seeking truth and reporting it, minimizing harm in our coverage, acting independently, and being accountable in our work.

Pinball is a pop culture product. If we’re going to grow Kineticist and, to an extent, grow pinball, we can’t just keep writing for the same core pinball enthusiast audience. It’s not big enough now and isn’t growing fast enough. We need to tell stories at the intersection of pinball, music, movies, and games, and introduce more mainstream audiences to high-quality pinball coverage.

Right now, a membership is a great way to support our work, get some exclusive content, and be part of our private community. It can be more than that, and I have some ideas to explore that would make it the best value in pinball media.

Maybe my hottest pinball take is that there are too many independent entities. Maybe not at the manufacturer level, but definitely at the media and content level. If we’re going to make this work, we’ll need to expand into other media, such as video and audio, and we’ll likely need to do that alongside other like-minded creators and businesses.

Realistically, I’m pushing this as far as one person can. To grow, Kineticist will need writers, editors, designers, developers, and community support who are as invested as I am in seeing this grow.

I don’t have a perfect closer to this. The support we’ve received from readers during this Back Indie Media Drive campaign has been incredible to see and has given me renewed hope and energy. Running Kineticist is messy and exhausting, but also the most creatively and personally fulfilling work I’ve ever done.

I’m clear on what Kineticist is, what it needs, and where it can go. Where it goes next is entirely up to you.