(2020-11-25) Levy The Tenuous Promise Of The Substack Dream

Steven Levy: The Tenuous Promise of the Substack Dream.

Substack CEO Chris Best tells me that while he’s not out to kill what’s left of big media, the ad-free newsletter model has advantages over what traditional journalism has become—a chase for clicks where “most people’s media diets get determined by social media,” he says.

If you are paying $100 a year to follow a single writer, you’d surely be more thoughtful about it! That’s the price of Platformer, Casey Newton’s new Substack

if he draws a relatively modest paying audience, he can match his previous salary. “I only need to have 3,000 subscribers to have the best job in journalism,” he says.

Even in these nascent days, there’s a term for the problem:“subscription fatigue.”

I suspect that in the long run, star writers like Newton or the former Rolling Stone scribe Matt Taibbi, another Substack luminary, will eventually rejoin bigger publications.

Nonetheless, the Substack model has a future. It is perfect for enterprising reporters—ambitious newcomers, disgruntled mid-termers, and post-buyout veterans—to pick an unfilled niche that serves the obsessions or business needs of small groups of people with some cash to spend.