Why We're Freaking Out About Substack - The New York Times - 0 views
-
he new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to labor unions to level out pay scales.
-
This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were.
-
Though Substack paid advances to a few dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald.
- ...16 more annotations...
-
This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels.
-
Substack’s thesis is, in part, that media companies underpay their most prominent writers. So far, that seems to be bearing out.
-
many of the writers who took advances now regret doing so: They would have made more money by simply collecting subscription revenue, and paying Substack 10 percent, than making the more complex deals with money up front.
-
The former Vox writer Matthew Yglesias calculated that taking the advance wound up costing him nearly $400,000 in subscription revenue paid to Substack
-
One of the writers who left Substack over transgender issues, Jude Doyle, argued that its system of advances amounted to a kind of editorial policy. But the analogy to a media company isn’t clear.
-
Grace Lavery said she wanted Substack to be more aggressive about stopping harassment, but said she didn’t think threats to boycott the email service over writers she disagrees with made political sense.
-
it’s easy to leave. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, Substack writers can simply take their email lists and direct connections to their readers with them.
-
The real threat is competing platforms with a different model. The most technically powerful of those is probably Ghost, which allows writers to send and charge for newsletters, with monthly fees starting at $9.
-
While Substack is backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ghost has Wikipedia vibes: It is open-source software developed by a nonprofit.
-
“Boycotting Substack because of Jesse Singal would be like boycotting a paper company” over a writer who has books printed on their paper, she said.
-
Ghost represents an even purer departure from legacy media. More than half of the sites on the platform simply run the software off their own servers.
-
Mr. Sullivan, who said he saw Substack as his tech platform, not his publisher, has begun deliberately promoting smaller writers in an “In the Stacks” section and said he was interested in figuring out how to bundle subscriptions.
-
This week, eight writers who cover tech, media and culture — Mr. Warzel, Mr. Newton, Anne Helen Petersen, Nick Quah, Eric Newcomer, Delia Cai, Ryan Broderick and Kim Zetter — are starting a “virtual newsroom” called Sidechannel on Discord, a platform for text and voice conversations
-
“We’re coming out of this era where platforms own people, and moving into this era where people own platforms,” he said. “We have to prove to the writers we’re delivering enough value to them to keep them happy and help them succeed.”
-
my informal survey of Substack writers found that most are fond of the company and plan to stick around for now — but not out of the sense of loyalty, shared mission or deep identification that used to run through media companies.