The Continuing Adventures of Substack
The Continuing Adventures of Substack
Good morning.
There was another mass shooting in the United States this week and 10 more people are dead. I don’t know what to say at this point.
Other than that, no preamble this week. There’s a lot to get to.
Your Weekly Roundup
Don’t worry, I’ll get to all the Substack stuff.
We start this week with two resources from the Asian American Journalist Associate that I found clearly articulated how journalists should approach covering the shootings in Atlanta as well as the diversity issues currently found in newsrooms across the country.
In major, late-breaking news, on Wednesday evening MEL Magazine announced that it would be parting ways with its parent company Dollar Shave Club and looking for a new buyer—or Dollar Shave Club shuttered MEL and laid off its entire staff. This is awful news for the layoffs alone, but also because MEL and Dollar Shave Club seemed to have created a model for brands who wanted to build a content arm that was truly interesting. But of course it wasn’t that simple. I’m sure more is bound to come out of this story in the coming days.
The other major news this past week was an announcement by Medium CEO Ev Williams that the company would be changing leadership and strategy on its Editorial side and offering staff members buyouts via a voluntary separation program (VSP). Williams’s letter details Medium’s strategy behind firmly forming its Editorial operation in 2018 and developing original publications like OneZero, Zora, Elemental, and Marker as well as why they are moving away from it now in favor of supporting more individual writers and editors versus a publication brand. There’s a ton to unpack here—namely why Medium “ launch[ed] seven magazine-style pubs within nine months, with a team of about 80 by year’s end” in 2019 even though they knew the dangers of the digital publication model instead of taking a more incremental approach; what happens to staff members who don’t take the buyout; and the fact that their latest strategy shift seems to fall in line with the theme of “media company as record label.” I’m going to come back to this one in another newsletter, but Casey Newton already has a deep dive.
Taking these two blows—as well as the news of the layoffs at HuffPost earlier this month—into account, this is all just another sign of the contracting media industry.
There was also big news around the New York Times’s decision to abandon its 77,000 member cooking group on Facebook. I’m fascinated by this story and will definitely come back to it and the idea of groups in the future.
On Monday, Paul Farhi at the Washington Post wrote a piece looking at the recent traffic slump the Post and the New York Times have seen in the post-Trump era. I get why the Post wanted to run this story, but I wonder if it was necessary just two months after Biden’s inauguration and almost three months after an insurrection on our government. And also because maybe it’s happening to conservative news outlets as well.
Next we have a series of items on the controversy over the hiring and then firing of Alexi McCammond as editor in chief of Teen Vogue.
Here is the straight news story from the New York Times from last Thursday.
Next is a segment from CNN’s Reliable Sources (pulled from Brian Stelter’s newsletter of the same name) on the “purity wars.”
Finally, here is an excellent analysis from Elizabeth Spiers at her Substack “My New Brand Is” that explains how multiple things are true at once in this story.
Last Thursday, Bloomberg ran a story looking at how games like Spelling Bee (Where are my Spelling Bee heads? I know you all play!) are becoming an increasing way for the New York Times to diversify their subscriber revenue and avoid the post-Trump slump that Paul Farhi covered in his aforementioned piece.
Speaking of Bloomberg, last Friday, the PressGazette published a piece profiling Justin B. Smith, the CEO of Bloomberg Media. The piece doesn’t offer anything that hasn’t been reported before but it gives Smith a chance to create a “sound bite” about Bloomberg’s pace to grow revenue by 35% in 2021 as well as to take some shots at the lack of imagination found on the business side of other media organizations.
Meanwhile, last week we also had a pair of notable digital advertising stories:
First, over at Wired, Gilad Edelman took a closer look at what Google’s decision to stop tracking third-party cookies from Google Chrome in order to sell user data so that advertisers can better target their ads. Spoiler: There will still be tracking and targeting, it will just be slightly different.
And at the Wall Street Journal, Keach Hagey and Suzanna Vranica covered how the COVID-19 pandemic increased Facebook, Google, and Amazon’s dominance on digital advertising.
Last Thursday, the Business of Business published a video (also transcribed as an article) interview with Austin Rief, one of the founders of the wildly successful Morning Brew. There’s a lot of interesting insight in Rief’s answers and in the Morning Brew story over all. But this quote stuck out to me when he was asked if he considers Morning Brew a tech company or a media company:
“I don't really worry about labels so much. I mean, maybe we're a media company. But I think media and commerce — it's all converging. And we will absolutely look, at some point, to launch a subscription service or something that will get direct revenue from our user, whether it's a subscription or a one off paid thing. It's about finding the best business model for us. We're gonna explore a lot of different revenue opportunities, but we still see so much room to go in the ad-based business. We want to get this right and then expand — we don't want to also get into commerce and subscription and everything in the same year. It's just too much.”
Finally, I’ve covered text messaging as a form of audience engagement in the past and how I subscribe to a text group called “This Week In Digital Media.” I’ve been skeptical of texting as a real means of audience engagement, but this week’s group text led by Anita Zielina was really good! A lot of discussion around management and leadership at media companies that I found truly...uh….engaging! As well as necessary.
What I’m Engaged With
What have I been engaged with this week? More novel revisions—and I probably will be for some time. I’m trying to manage my time outside of work as best I can and while I have my own thoughts on the continued discourse around Substack, there’s been a lot of writing out there already that does a great job assessing what has been going on over the past two weeks.
First, there’s Annalee Newitz’s overview (on Substack) from March 17th of why Substack’s “scam” has “worked so well.”
Next, there’s Peter Kafka’s deep dive at Recode on March 19th.
There’s also Ben Thompson’s rather sober assessment of all the controversy at Stratechery from earlier this week.
And, finally, there’s also Mark Sternberg’s take on the Medium news and how it relates to Substack.
At the moment, I feel myself drawn to the points Thompson lays out in his piece. This isn’t simply a cut and dry case of Substack being “bad” because they are supporting writers with controversial opinions—hell, the New York Times does that. And, I don’t know, I’m not as bent-out-of-shape about the fact that they give advances to certain writers as well as the fact that the names of those writers has been obscured. But maybe I should be more upset.
Is Substack wading into waters that are murky and actively making murkier? Yes, I think so. Does it currently have what appears to be the best available product for the most people looking to start a newsletter that gives them the most options for creating a platform or structure that works for them? It appears so. Will that last forever? Potentially not.
It just seems symbolic to me of something that the narrative around Substack has been that it is the “future” of publishing (you remember that, don’t you?) until it wasn’t. Now the narrative is that Substack is bad.
Maybe it is that simple, but I’m not sure.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: “Dues” by Ronee Blakley (1972)
A not so dirty secret about me: I don’t really know anything about movies. Sure, I’ve seen a good amount of them, but not really that many. So, on a recent weekend when my girlfriend was out of the apartment, I stretched out and watched one of the movies that I should have seen a long time ago: Robert Altman’s near-three-hour-long magnum opus Nashville (1975).
For those that don’t know about Nashville, there’s plenty of reading to be done about the movie. There’s a few old Roger Ebert pieces (always must reads) and there’s Pauline Kael’s epic (and notorious, since it was in some ways viewed as actual marketing for Altman’s movie) essay about the film in The New Yorker. But basically the movie “centers” around a sprawling cast of characters living their lives in Nashville over a five-day period, leading up to a benefit concert for an outsider presidential candidate running on the Replacement Party platform. Kael’s essay goes straight to my heart when she compares the film to the work of James Joyce, specifically Ulysses. (Yes, if you don’t know me well, I’m one of those guys.) And it's hard not to see qualities of Dubliners or the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of Ulysses in the film’s structure, appreciation for everyday detail, and ability to paint multiple vivid character portraits in a relatively (for the depth of and number of characters) limited amount of time—I mean the Snyder Cut of Justice League was four hours!
I could write about the actual film Nashville for hours (after watching Nashville and 9 to 5 in the span of a month I want to read a “Lily Tomlin is overlooked as one of the best performers of the 20th century” piece one of these days), but I’m going to focus on the soundtrack and specifically one song. Altman wanted the soundtrack to feel like an average week or weekend in Nashville and the songs run the gamut of hokey to heartbreaking. And to give the music a sense of authenticity, he let certain actors perform and record songs they actually wrote for their characters.
One of those songs is “Dues” by the singer-songwriter Ronee Blakley. “Dues” wasn’t written specifically for Nashville. The song actually comes from Blakley’s self-titled 1972 album, but who’s counting? In the film, Blakley plays the fragile, but beloved country star Barbara Jean. The filmed performance of the song that Blakley gives in the film is arresting, and arguably the best sequence in the movie (though it's close with two others). But for me, it is without a doubt the best song. I dare you to listen to the chorus and not feel your soul swoon along with Blakley’s voice; I dare you not to feel the greatest sense of melancholy and longing, without knowing exactly why, after the track ends.