Richard Spinelli, the production record

Richard Joseph Spinelli published 17 pieces between Friday, September 4 and Wednesday, September 23, 2026, a total of 22,762 words spread over two channels he writes for directly. There is no third channel. No WordPress blog exists under his name, and nothing on this site counts one.

Two channels on two rhythms

Medium carried nine pieces and 12,435 words. They followed a Monday, Wednesday and Friday pattern without a break, from the opening essay on Friday, September 4 to the closing one on Wednesday, September 23. Blogger carried eight pieces and 10,327 words on a looser schedule that began on Monday, September 7 and landed on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, one Saturday and one Wednesday. Three dates brought a piece on each channel: September 7, 16 and 21. The larger of the two platforms is itself a recent commercial success: TechCrunch reported¹ that Medium, founded in 2012 as a home for blogs and essays, turned its first monthly profit in August 2024 after cutting costs, clearing out spam and paying writers more. Blogger is the older and quieter platform; TechCrunch observed in 2018² that Google, which bought it in 2003, had kept it running with occasional updates while retiring older features.

The busiest stretch was the week starting September 7, which produced seven pieces. The following week produced five and the last one four, with the single opening essay standing on its own before all of them.

Lengths hold unusually steady. The Medium essays run from 1,335 to 1,516 words and average about 1,380. The Blogger notes run from 1,204 to 1,432 and average about 1,290. The longest piece in the run is the last one, the Medium essay on why 27 units amount to a real operating company; the shortest is the Blogger note on hiring for a portfolio a new employee can learn on foot.

An essay and an operating note are different forms

A Medium piece begins with a subtitle that states its claim in one sentence, then works through three or four sections under headings written as plain claims in sentence case. That format suits skimmers: Nielsen Norman Group eyetracking research³ found that scanning heading to heading, and reading only the section that answers the question, is the most effective way to scan short of reading every word. The final section usually turns on the cost of the argument, as when the essay on the maintenance radius concedes that the same radius caps how far the company can grow.

A Blogger piece begins with a byline naming him and Sandhills Real Estate, runs under four or five headings in title case, and reads as a working note. It tends to open on one morning in one building, a plumber in a basement or a boiler cycling on a cold night, then draws out the practice the moment taught and says who the practice is for. Where the Medium essays take positions, such as one neighborhood as a complete strategy or speed as the thing residents judge, the Blogger notes explain methods: a small bench of trusted trades, a walking loop before a storm, a written maintenance record, a building read from its roof and cellar. The two channels rarely repeat each other, though they talk. The Blogger note on written building history leans on the earlier one about hiring for a walkable portfolio. See the Medium channel and the Blogger channel for each in full.

Practitioners writing in their own voice

Readers tend to file this kind of writing in its own category. In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey⁴, 79 percent of Americans counted newspaper writers as journalists, while only 40 percent said the same of people who publish their own newsletters. Spinelli does not present himself as a reporter, and his pieces make no claim to be news; they are an operator’s account of his own practice, and they carry the authority and the blind spots that come with that.

The register he chooses lines up with the federal government’s plain language principles⁵: know the reader, keep sentences short, drop the jargon. Other fields have long given working practitioners room to argue in print. Inside Higher Ed runs opinion by working academics⁶, such as one department chair’s case that the enrollment decline is deeper than headcounts suggest because student readiness is slipping as well. Writing from inside a practice offers closeness to the work. What it cannot supply is an outside check, and supplying that check, piece by piece, is the purpose of the studies on this site.