Is Substack the Media Future We Want?

The newsletter service is a software company that, by mimicking some of the functions of newsrooms, has made itself difficult to categorize.

Nahman publishes “Maybe Baby” on Substack, a service that enables writers to draft, edit, and send e-mail newsletters to subscribers. Writers can choose whether subscriptions are free or paid; the minimum charge for paid subscriptions is five dollars a month or thirty dollars a year, and Substack takes ten per cent of all revenue. Nahman’s Sunday newsletter is free, but a paid subscription to “Maybe Baby,” which costs the minimum fee, includes access to a weekly podcast and a monthly advice column. (...)

In its variety, the Substack corpus resembles the blogosphere. It is produced by a mix of career journalists, bloggers, specialists, novelists, hobbyists, dabblers, and white-collar professionals looking to plump up their personal brands. The company has tried to recruit high-profile writers, offering (to a select few) health-care stipends, design help, and money to hire freelance editors. In certain instances, Substack has also paid advances, often in the generous six figures, incentivizing writers to produce work without employing them. Substack writers can apply for access to a legal-defense fund, which covers up to a million dollars in legal fees on a case-by-case basis. Casey Newton, a tech journalist who has written about Silicon Valley for a decade, left the Verge in September to launch the Substack newsletter “Platformer,” a solo venture, where he analyzes news about social networks and democracy (ten dollars per month). Newton, who is a friend of mine, declined an advance but took a health-care stipend; he joked to me that his life has now been twice disrupted by the Internet—first when he was a newspaper journalist, “and the Web came along and devoured print,” and then a decade later, when “social networks came along and devoured the Web.” Substack has also recruited the former BuzzFeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen and the Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, who left his staff job to write a newsletter; both were given substantial advances. Other well-known writers have started Substack newsletters without brokering deals with the company, including the rock critic Robert Christgau, whose “And It Don’t Stop” is a trove of winding essays on music, television, and science fiction (five dollars per month). After going on leave from the Times this spring, the food writer Alison Roman started “A Newsletter,” which contains recipes and breezy, bossy, self-deprecating anecdotes (five dollars per month).

When Substack launched, in 2017, the founders posted a mission statement of sorts to “Substack Blog” (free). After beginning with an anecdote about how, in 1883, the New York Sun incorporated advertisements, the post went on to detail the current state of journalism:

The great journalistic totems of the last century are dying. News organizations—and other entities that masquerade as them—are turning to increasingly desperate measures for survival. And so we have content farms, clickbait, listicles, inane but viral debates over optical illusions, and a “fake news” epidemic. Just as damaging is that, in the eyes of consumers, journalistic content has lost much of its perceived value—especially as measured in dollars.

It’s easy to feel discouraged by these dire developments, but in every crisis there is opportunity. We believe that journalistic content has intrinsic value and that it doesn’t have to be given away for free. We believe that what you read matters. And we believe that there has never been a better time to bolster and protect those ideals.

The subscription-based news industry, the founders speculated, could someday “be much larger than the newspaper business ever was, much like the ride-hailing industry in San Francisco is bigger than the taxi industry was before Lyft and Uber.” These days, Substack’s founders, investors, and marketing materials all have different ways of describing the startup’s mission. Depending on which source you consult, Substack might be “reinventing publishing,” “pioneering a new ‘business model for culture,’ ” or “attempting to build an alternative media economy that gives journalists autonomy.” It is “writers firing their old business model” or “a better future for news.” Substack’s C.E.O., Chris Best, has said that the company’s intention is “to make it so that you could type into this box, and if the things you type are good, you’re going to get rich.” Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s co-founders, told me that he sees the company as an alternative to social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. “We started Substack because we were fed up about the effects of the social-media diet,” McKenzie said. Substack’s home page now reads, “Take back your mind.”

Substack, like Facebook, insists that it is not a media company; it is, instead, “a platform that enables writers and readers.” But other newsletter platforms, such as Revue, Lede, or TinyLetter (a service owned by Mailchimp, the e-mail-marketing company), have never offered incentives to attract writers. By piloting programs, like the legal-defense fund, that “re-create some of the value provided by newsrooms,” as McKenzie put it, Substack has made itself difficult to categorize: it’s a software company with the trappings of a digital-media concern. The company, which currently has twenty employees, has a lightweight content-moderation policy, which prohibits harassment, threats, spam, pornography, and calls for violence; moderation decisions are made by the founders, and, McKenzie told me, the company does not comment on them. Best has suggested that Substack contains a built-in moderation mechanism in the form of the Unsubscribe button. (...)

Nahman’s income from “Maybe Baby” well exceeds the full-time salary she made at Man Repeller; Yglesias’s newsletter, “Slow Boring,” has a readership that includes more than six thousand paid subscribers, and he is making twenty-seven thousand dollars a month. (Yglesias opted to receive a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar advance from Substack, which, in return, will take eighty-five per cent of the subscription revenue from his first year. In his second year, Substack’s commission will revert to ten per cent.) But Substack’s founders have acknowledged that, for the majority of writers, a newsletter will be a side hustle. In most cases, subscription fees will generate not a salary but something closer to tips. In a recent blog post on Medium, Hunter Walk, a venture capitalist, compared a newsletter to a stock-keeping unit, or sku, a term of art in inventory management. “The biggest impact of someone like Casey [Newton] unbundling himself” from the Verge, Walk wrote, “is that he is now an entrepreneur with a product called Casey. His beachhead may very well be a paid newsletter . . . but the newsletter is just one sku. . . . There could be a podcast sku. A speaking fee sku. A book deal sku. A consulting sku. A guest columnist sku. And so on.” Lisa Gitelman, a media historian and professor at New York University, said, of Substack, “They obviously want to call it a democratizing gesture, which I find a little bit specious. It’s the democracy of neoliberal self-empowerment. The message to users is that you can empower yourself by creating.” (...)

The durability and sustainability of the digital-newsletter model remain to be seen. Carving out new ways for writers to make money from their work is surely a good thing: the United States lost sixteen thousand newsroom jobs this year, and many mainstream publications have struggled to overcome issues like discrimination, clubbiness, and prohibitively low compensation. But whether Substack is good for writers is one question; another is whether a world in which subscription newsletters rival magazines and newspapers is a world that people want. A robust press is essential to a functioning democracy, and a cultural turn toward journalistic individualism might not be in the collective interest. It is expensive and laborious to hold powerful people and institutions to account, and, at many media organizations, any given article is the result of collaboration between writers, editors, copy editors, fact checkers, and producers. 

by Anna Wiener, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ard Su

[ed. Good for Substack and some journalists, maybe. Not so good if it ends up fracturing media even further.]