First off: thank you to the hundreds of people who have created accounts with The Pickup in our first week of operation. It’s been deeply affirming for Alicia, Zack and I to so many of you sign on for this little enterprise, and we do not take your support for granted in the least.
But enough about us! What does subscribing to The Pickup do for you?
Since we’re a fairly new kind of local business, I thought it’d be helpful to walk you through your subscription benefits so that you get the most out of The Pickup.
What are your subscription benefits?
To start, we offer subscriptions to The Pickup at three tiers. (You can also create an account and read articles for free, though you’ll eventually bump into a hard paywall.) Let’s run through the list of benefits, which start with the basics and get fancier as you go down:
- Full access to all the articles on the site
- Gift article links
- Commenting privileges
- Newsletters mailed directly to your inbox
- Merch drops
- Freebies and invitations to subscriber-exclusive events (by the way, if anybody out there works for any of Tulsa’s great cultural institutions and wants to offer discounts or freebies to our subscriber base, please get in touch with me at matt@thepickup.com)
- Gift subscriptions to share with friends, family and neighbors
Since The Pickup has had its doors open (or maybe I should say its tailgate down?) for just a few days now, please trust me when I say that this is the beginning of this enterprise and we’ll adapt as we go. Our business model is very simple: we’re trying to create new subscribers and retain existing ones. So the focus of that retention effort will always be to improve on the quantity and quality of benefits we offer to you, our most dedicated readers.
Now that we’ve gone over your benefits, here’s how to get the most out of them.
How to configure your Pickup user profile
Though it isn’t required, we strongly recommend that you set up a password with your Pickup account for your own ease and security. You can do this by clicking the button in the top-right corner of the site header, and then selecting My Account from the dropdown.
Please note that you must be logged in to set up your password or change it. You can always log in without a password by triggering the email to the inbox associated with your account, but setting a password makes things go a little smoother.
From here, navigate to Account Settings > Profile > Password. There you can set or reset your password as desired.
Here in Account Settings you have the ability to customize your Pickup user experience to your liking. Let’s run through all the options you’ve got:
- You can set your default color mode as Light Mode or Dark Mode.
- You can opt into (or out of) the newsletters you wish to receive from us. We send two newsletters a week to Red Dirt subscribers and more to the Sunday Paper and Certified Gold subscribers.
- You can set up your commenter username and avatar and start commenting. Shoutout to my two favorite commenter handles kathytaylorhasthebiggesthouseintulsabutdoesNOTtiplikeit and PokuWatch—we’re starting off very strong here.
- You can also change your subscription tier and payment method anytime you like.
What to do with our posts
Posts! We’re trying to post new articles for you each day. Our editorial mix will contain feature stories, profiles, commentary on local news and culture, guides, gripes, reviews, dives into local lore and basically anything that other local media outlets wouldn’t publish. Here’s what a typical week will look like.
- Monday: Ad hoc post(s); Tulsa Picks newsletter goes out
- Tuesday: New Tulsa Picks post; The Accelerator newsletter goes out
- Wednesday: The biggest story of the week goes up on the site
- Thursday: Ad hoc post(s)
- Friday: Weekly open thread | We turn the site over to our commenters; The Talegate newsletter goes out
- Biweekly: The Transmission newsletter goes out
I’ll stress that this is a rough schedule and we’ll tinker with it as we get feedback from subscribers and settle into our rhythm. The goal is to produce 4-8 original stories for you each week.
Other things you can do with our posts:
- Comment on them! We love to hear from subscribers.
- Share them with your friends, neighbors and family using the Gift Article functionality. Referrals are going to be crucial for us when it comes to building this business, so whenever you read a good story in The Pickup (which we hope will be pretty often) please do us a solid and gift it to a friend via text or your preferred social media network.
Other ways to support The Pickup
- Bookmark us on your browser! Google Search is getting clogged up with AI slop, SEO turned out to be about as false as the pivot to video, and the days of Facebook sending bookoo traffic to publishers are long gone. So the best way to visit us is the classic “punch our domain into your browser.” As a matter of strategy, we plan to spend our time producing as many good stories as we can, and then posting them to the site and emailing to you. It’s that simple.
- Give us feedback! We’ll send out user surveys in the future, but we do pay attention to the comments and invite story tips and pitches from all kinds of writers.
- Come to our events! We’re planning a “launch” party for subscribers in March, so stay tuned for more information on that.
- Buy our merch! The first Pickup merch drop is coming this spring.
Also, I should give a major kudos to Tulsa Performing Arts Center for agreeing to sponsor us when we had an audience of zero. Alicia, Zack and I are grateful for their support, and encourage our readers to get involved with the arts in Tulsa via any one of TPAC’s many community-based initiatives.
