Where Does the Substack Story Go in 2021?
Good morning.
I don’t have anything to say. Yesterday was a dark day in American history. I’m hoping for better; I really am. But it’s getting hard. And with two weeks left, if no one will impeach him and remove him from office, then we need to deplatform him.
That’s all I’ll say.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start the first newsletter of the new year with two deep media business news stories!
First, on the “vulture capital” beat, Michael J. de la Merced and Marc Tracey at the New York Times reported on Alden Capital’s bid to acquire the entirety of the shares of Tribune Publishing. Alden already holds the majority of shares in Tribune Publishing, which is the parent company of such newspapers as The Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, and The Baltimore Sun. Alden Capital is known for stripping news organizations for parts in order to maximize a profit. Dan Barry’s profile of Pottstown Mercury reporter Evan Brandt brought Alden Capital into focus last summer, showing the toll their practices take on the individual reporters still doing work for the papers they have and continue to gut. And on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about a labor union representing employees from seven of Tribune Publishing’s newsrooms demanding the removal of three Alden Capital representatives from Tribune’s board.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Politico acquired E&E News, a nearly 14-year-old “high-price subscription trade publication focused on the energy industry and environmental news.” E&E News will continue to operate as a separate brand, and the move is meant to diversify Politico’s revenue as “the majority of Politico’s business comes from professional subscriptions,” per the company’s publisher Robert Allbritton. As the Wall Street Journal notes, 2020 ended as Politico’s most profitable year to date.
On Monday, Katie Robertson at the New York Times reported the news that Lindsay Peoples Wagner will be leaving her role as editor in chief of Teen Vogue to fill the same role at The Cut. Peoples Wagner is only 30 years old and has already been the youngest editor in chief of a Condé Nast magazine and was previously the fashion market editor for The Cut.
Over at the Washington Post, employees are set to receive special bonuses of $2,021 dollars (you see what they did there?) as “a sign of gratitude” for “exceptional service through the challenges of 2020,” per reporting from TheWrap. As TheWrap points out, Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post increased his wealth by $75.4 billion in 2020.
Next we have two podcast-related items:
First, last week the news broke that Amazon will be purchasing Wondery, one of the last major independent podcast networks. The move immediately sets Amazon up to better compete against Spotify for original podcast programming and user attention.
And second, in what I think is a particularly interesting story, Twitter announced on Tuesday that it would be acquiring the social podcasting app Breaker to “improve the health of public conversation” on the platform and to help develop its Spaces tool. I’m going to dive into this story a little more next week once I’m able to do a bit more reading.
At Josh Sternberg’s Substack, The Media Nut, he took a look at how media outlets help spread lies and misinformation rather than debunk them. This is a nice breakdown with some very recent examples.
Last week at The Atlantic, McKay Coppins wrote about what the future may look like for reporters who made their names fighting with Donald Trump.
Speaking of predictions, I’m not really any good at them (as you’ll see in the next section). Luckily, NiemanLab got a great group of media and journalism professionals to give their thoughts on what 2021 could look like. I highly recommend looking each of these entries over. I’m a fan of this one in particular.
And, finally, Today in Tabs is back. Well, actually, I never really knew about it before—but everyone is glad it’s back now. I wish I knew about it earlier because this is exactly the kind of newsletter I need to keep up with the conversation on Twitter each day since it’s a well-established fact that I’m pretty washed. I’ve never been good at paying attention to media gossip (as you can see, my interests lean on the very dry side of the industry), so this newsletter is an essential read for me now in order to keep my bones from turning into dust.
What I’m Engaged With
I spent most of 2020 talking about Substack, so why not continue that conversation immediately in 2021?!
Last week, The New Yorker ran a long piece by contributing writer (and author of the popular memoir/Silicon Valley chronicle Uncanny Valley) Anna Wiener about Substack. Weiner’s piece is featured in the January 4th and January 11th print edition of the magazine and it’s basically The New Yorker print subscriber version of the same Substack story that’s been written for the past five or six months. That’s not a knock—it’s a good piece. In fact, I love when The New Yorker now runs a story that is clearly pointed at their print demographic. (My friend Erik used to call these the articles for his mom.) I’m just saying a lot of Wiener’s story has already been covered in other places.
The parts of Wiener’s piece that I find the most interesting are near the end. I’ll quote the sections liberally below:
“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. McKenzie, the Substack co-founder, assured me that the platform should be considered only ‘one of the models alongside others,’ pointing to the potential for worker-owned coöperatives, nonprofit newsrooms, and state-funded media. (There are also other models for newsletters; one Substack competitor, Ghost, is a nonprofit, and its technology is open-source.) McKenzie went on, ‘The more ‘generalized newspaper’ world has been diminishing anyway, a trend that started before Substack, and I don’t think there’s any turning back on that. The genie is out of the bottle.’”
“Substack recently launched a feature called Substack Reader, which gathers readers’ newsletter and podcast subscriptions in one place, on the company’s Web site. The product is the digital equivalent of a three-ring binder: a way to manage newsletter overload. Reader also has an option for integrating outside RSS feeds. It seems to have taken its cue from Google Reader, an aggregator that, until it shut down, in 2013, had an ardent user base. It also resembles Tumblr’s dashboard, Twitter’s timeline, and Facebook’s News Feed, and looks less like a reaction against social media than like its evolution. Substack, like these social networks, allows readers to create an information ecosystem populated by individuals of their choosing.”
I find these sections interesting for three reasons. The first is that, here, Wiener touches on the skepticism that many have had about Substack serving as a way for individual writers to make money, but perhaps creating simply another venue for people with a platform to spread disinformation and opinion as reported, vetted, and checked fact. Second, she touches on the fact that Substack is realizing that users may want to see the newsletters and voices they choose to give money to alongside each other, as well as alongside other voices they value but perhaps don’t pay for. And third, she touches on the fact that Substack itself admits that they are one model out of many—one that happens to be the trendiest and has the least amount of friction to, if you have an audience and platform already, to go from $0 to a potentially sustainable or even lucrative individual income.
Why those points fascinate me is that I feel like those are the three places the Substack conversation is going to go in 2021: how dangerous are unchecked voices with large audiences that can be monetized; how do you manage or maintain subscriptions and how does Substack truly become an alternative to the exhaustion of feeds; and does Substack eventually give rise to more “groups” or “stables” of writers or newsletter working together in something resembling a good ol’ fashioned publication—but better or perhaps more egalitarian. Or, do these writers form groups and then move on from Substack to a platform that is maybe more lucrative or that has better product features.
Ben Smith covered the launch of Punchbowl (founded by veterans of Politico’s popular Playbook blog) in his most recent column; Defector Media seems to be doing well; and Brickhouse Cooperative is promising and idealistic. These are all non-Substack efforts built by writers and editors with varying levels of built-in audience. Will Substack develop as the place for these kinds of initiatives in 2021? Will writers move off Substack to build these kinds of organizations in 2021? Or will more and more individual writers continue to vie for subscription dollars on Substack?
I’m inclined to lean towards the first option. But, as always, nobody knows anything—and I certainly know nothing.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: “Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic (1971) and “Aisumasen (I’m Sorry)” by John Lennon (1973)
One of these songs doesn’t have much in the way of real lyrics, while the other is an apology to Yoko Ono. But the feel of each of these songs is how I feel today. And each one gives me a little bit of solace. And that’s all I’ve got.