But Elon Musk’s obsession with conspiracy, his piecemeal algorithmic tweaks, his desperate desire to monetize everything — all this has undermined the features that made Twitter useful and occasionally enjoyable for even the nonruling class. The site is glitchier than ever, hobbled by mass layoffs, mass rehirings, mass outages, and mass attention-seeking viral events. Above all the reading experience has gotten much worse: one’s feed is now filled with so many unknown users and cut-rate ads that even the lawyers are barely visible.
Will the whole thing simply go away, disappearing into the internet’s unforgiving past tense? This is the fate one occasionally longs for, but it won’t happen anytime soon. Twitter, in the end, has proven simply too dumb to fail. Instead it seems poised to survive indefinitely, albeit in corroded form — forever catering to hucksters and marks, the passive and the desperate. The self-respecting reader might feel like it’s time to search elsewhere for new ideas. But where? (...)
Punchbowl News costs $30 a month. Air Mail goes for $79.99 a year, though students and educators get the first year free — a kind but deeply strange discount that suggests a longing for details about the sex lives of aging restaurateurs not typically seen among students or educators. An annual membership in Puck’s Inner Circle is $250 and offers readers the chance to “break the 4th wall with direct access to Puck’s elite talent” and receive “exclusive access to signature Puck merch collabs.” The new Gabriel Snyder venture the Fine Print, which unlike Puck publishes serious media reporting, is $99 a year and is signature merch collab–free. This is the next thing one notices about reading on the internet now: it costs a lot of money.
And there is no way to avoid paying. After a long and glorious spell of underpolicing, the modern paywall has attained its final, fortress-defending form. For years the illicit pleasure of an incognito tab often exceeded the actual reading experience. Today’s paywalls, however, are hostile and impenetrable. Might they be sentient too? Every week new websites and browser extensions emerge to tunnel through or scramble over the walls, and every week they are crushed by rocks and catapults. Punchbowl News will never let the rabble in. Merely thinking about reading one too many
Bloomberg Businessweek pieces now carries with it a substantial fine. If you attempt to access anything beyond your three monthly allotted
Atlantic pieces, Jeffrey Goldberg will pay a personal visit to your home and do krav maga on you.
In the good old porous days, paywalls had the quality of a suggestion. Now they are binding contracts with strong personalities. The
New Yorker and the
London Review of Books, which log readers out much more reliably than they keep them logged in, are aggressive bouncers averse to bribes and persuasion. Contra its gloomy disposition and intense commitment to Courier, which give it the appearance of a bomb threat, Leon Wieseltier’s Liberties is more like a generous (if creepy) uncle, offering two free articles in exchange for an email address. The twisted minds at the
New York Review of Books have perfected the length of their preview text, guaranteeing cut-off at the point of maximal tantalization. (...) But alas: what follows is a subscription offer.
Paywalls, of course, keep publications in business, even if an online subscription can never replicate the pleasures of print. But even the most passionate faith in the system’s logic is liable to be shaken by regular encounters with the draconian paywalls of local news sites. An attempt to read even a single article in the
Houston Chronicle or the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution or any number of other newspapers slams the reader against an unforgiving prompt for a one-time micropayment followed by a weekly rate somewhere down the line. Pay nothing, read nothing — beyond a lede or a dateline. On their own, these fees are small and even reasonable. Still, the situation is clearly counterproductive: Who is going to subscribe when it’s impossible to know exactly what one is subscribing to? There are stories in these papers about the depravities of local cops, state legislatures, and transnational landlords that could provide an essential service, and nothing quite literalizes the tragedy of local news like the obvious fact that, in the face of such discouragement, the vast majority of people simply won’t read their local reporting at all. In a recent piece for NiemanLab, Joshua Benton noted that the ailing newspaper chain Gannett, whose properties include the
Arizona Republic and the
Detroit Free Press, among many others, spent more in the fourth quarter of 2022 on debt service than it brought in from digital subscriptions across the entire company. “You can debate the direction of causation,” Benton wrote: “how much [Gannett’s budget] cuts were driven by declining revenues, versus how much the declining revenues were driven by the cuts.” Either way, militantly keeping newspapers away from their readers did them no favors. At least some newspapers present the option to subscribe “maybe later.” Barring that, one sometimes finds oneself in the debased position of opening a new article, immediately selecting all, and pasting the results into an unformatted Google Doc before the paywall finishes loading. This kind of subterfuge can only generate sheepishness — but then again, how many subscriptions can one person handle?
This is the question posed by Substack. Whenever things on Twitter feel especially dire, writers remind their followers of their new Substacks, or their newly reactivated Substacks: “If this place goes down, follow me here.” (In recent weeks this has become harder to do, after Twitter effectively banned tweeting about Substacks.) Could Substack be the future? It certainly felt that way a few years ago. Its emergence in 2017 was greeted by the kind of Silicon Valley hype typically reserved for AI solutions to pied-Ã -terre management, and the kind of skepticism typically reserved for the wholesale elimination of the public commons. But Substack’s VC funders were never going to fully bring down writers and editors and their employers. Undercompensation, despair, and cultural marginalization will take care of that! The panic provoked by Substack’s emergence — and by its cheerleaders’ deterministic confidence — thus always felt overstated in its intensity.
But not in its particulars. From the beginning, the skeptics pointed out that even the most compelling self-curated bouquet of newsletters could never add up to anything more than its own kind of walled garden. Unlike generalist operations such as newspapers, TV news, and, well, magazines, Substack effectuates a radical dispersal of expertise and curiosity — a Substack in every pot (and about every pot). For readers, both finances and attention suffer. How many Substacks can we possibly pay for? And how many do we have time to read? It already feels like we spend more time in our email inbox than anywhere else. Must our leisure reading happen there, too?
It’s clear that Substack (and its functionally similar alternatives, like Ghost) has provided a steady income to a large and politically diverse group of people, some of whom were facing down uncertain futures before the newsletter infrastructure came along. Many of these writers are irritating, even malevolent. Many of them produce important reporting, rigorous criticism, and delightful esoterica that they are unable to publish anywhere else. But it is hard to be one’s own publisher. All Substackers, whether honest or self-dealing, are incentivized to iterate. By outsourcing the work of publishing — the editing, the marketing, the fundraising — onto authors, Substack has only accelerated a long-running trend toward universal basic freelancerization: more exhausting self-promotion, more money (maybe), more nominal autonomy and less actual autonomy, and above all more risk. [ed. See also:
Judgment Day Has Arrived for the Journalism Business (Honest Broker).]
For larger publications, the upside of newsletters is obvious. Email-bound readers can seamlessly swipe over from their Zocdoc appointment notification to their health insurance bill payment notification to their student loan payment notification to their local mass shooting notification to a
Washington Post opinion newsletter about the biggest threat facing the nation (still, somehow, cancel culture). Supplemental newsletter programming can expand publications’ reach, develop themes, help collect data, and offer a degree of plausible deniability if the writers get a little overheated: they’re independent contractors — they’re just riffing! But whether one is reading Vulture’s hourly
MILF Manor recap or a roundup of A. J. Liebling’s most memorable zingers from the
New Yorker archives, publications’ newsletters too often feel like semi-redundant monuments to segmentation. At least Jeffrey Goldberg won’t beat you up if you forward one to a friend.
Of course, no one has pursued newsletters as zealously as the legaciest legacy-media operation of them all: the
New York Times. The
Times’ expansionist tendencies speak less to the paper’s interest in newsletters than to its interest in everything. During the Trump presidency, with democracy at constant risk of dying in darkness, the
Times was an epicenter of liberal mass media production, its swirl of push notifications and daily Maggie Haberman pieces generating a shared sense that all the news that was fit to print had to be consumed in its entirety, hungrily and constantly. Now, with the national emergency depersonalized, the
Times has become the news industry’s Amazon, a miniconglomerate that specializes in international reporting
and podcasting
and sports commentary
and product reviews (the latter two, respectively, via the Athletic and Wirecutter, both standalone sites acquired after demonstrating category dominance). The
Times seems able to forge entire new empires faster than smaller publications can go through their bankruptcy proceedings. For millions of home cooks it is a recipe website with a news division; for Spelling Bee addicts it is a game website that also happens to contain non-game content.
With its Stakhanovite publication regimen and its massive reach, could the
Times simply replace the Twitter experience outright? Perhaps the entirety of political argument and cultural commentary one encounters on Twitter already exists inside the newspaper: in the articles, the newsletters, the aggrieved comments sections, and the opinion pages, which publish columns by some of America’s most dim-witted opinion-havers and also the visionary Jamelle Bouie, alongside a formidably diverse roster of contributors who have challenged
Times readers on everything from student debt relief to prison abolition. Anarchists for DeSantis, horny teens against sex scenes, tradcaths against guilt, communists for feudalism — these are the characters one found on Twitter, and increasingly one is likely to find them in the
Times, too.
So then why, given all this power and reach, does the most important and lavishly funded newspaper in the United States present itself to the world with the jittery paranoia of a terrorist cell facing defeat — paralyzed in its mountain hideout, bickering with itself, and treating everyone like an opponent that wishes it existential harm? In 2003, following the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal and also the one where it helped start a catastrophic and illegal war, the
Times made an uncharacteristic step in the direction of self-critique and hired a public editor. The best and most rigorous of these public editors, Margaret Sullivan, left in 2016, and the position was eliminated soon after. Since then, the paper’s response to readers’ criticisms has grown increasingly guarded. In her memoir, Sullivan devotes a chapter titled “But Her Emails . . .” to the most egregious recent example of the paper’s willful defensiveness, citing a report in the
Columbia Journalism Review by the researchers David Rothschild and Duncan Watts. Rothschild and Watts found that “the
New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the sixty-nine days leading up to the election.” (...)
The news industry’s major shifts since the height of the Twitter era have mostly been technological (new distribution platforms for new websites with new and ever-crazier ways to scroll) and material (new funding models with new volatile cash flows and new precarities). The
Times has assimilated many of these shifts, but its most important recent innovations have been thematic.
