Great piece. I'm very curious about what a new media fiefdom, which somehow suits the underlying shifts in technology and culture, while adhering to values that we presumably hold together, like an attempt at objectivity, would look like.
How is it different than what some big online media have now? Is it supposed to make money? And if so, how? And will its money mechanism give it different incentives than the fiefdoms it attempts to replace?
Frankly, I'm not sure that an op-ed by a screenwriter is the best example of east coast reporting. Editorial pages are famously wacky, and that's kind of the point of their existence, which makes them more similar to social media stars than either side of that analogy would like to admit.
There's a widespread dissatisfaction in tech right now with MSM and with the New York Times in particular. It's understandable, because the NYT is more critical of tech than it used to be (which seems to be part of and in a feedback loop with deeper cultural misgivings), and like other media, we see partisan currents within the paper writing biased stories in the guise of journalism. But that's just part of a larger (and in my opinion, invaluable) institution, that does the hard work of gathering and checking facts everyday.
How would a new media fiefdom do that better, while covering most newsworthy events? Getting to the facts, let alone the truth, is hard, and doing it on a daily basis across many topics is much harder. Doing it in a way that makes money is harder still. I suspect that many people in tech underestimate the difficulty of manuFACTuring, so to speak, the first contact between human understanding and as yet unwritten events.
Once you know what happened, send it as a prompt to GPT-3 and you'll get a great news story written in an inverted pyramid. But GPT-3 doesn't have feet on the ground yet. Those belong to biased humans.
It's an excellent question. And unlike some of my tech friends (who are even more anti-MSM than I am) I do think there's a place for investigative reporting that no number of substacks can replace.
Thought experiment: Let's say every writer at the NYT departs and starts their own Substack. What does the sum of those Substacks *not* have that the NYT does? Obviously, the name brand that gleans attention and inspires credibility, irrespective of the given author or topic.
That takes years to build. As the (nonetheless true) cliché goes: the best time to plan a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
What I hope is that the West Coast (which, to be clear, is almost a virtual concept rather than a geographic one) comes into its own as a source for media and commentary. To do that you start building institutions like Substack or Stripe Press that, over time, rise to the level of a HarperCollins or NYT (in updated form).
One of the more interesting problems for Substack writers and Substack itself to solve is that of recreating the collaboration that supports great writing and great journalism, as writers work under their own shingle.
So I think the answer to the question in your thought experiment is twofold: those hypothetical NYT writers don’t get collaboration or the economies of scale that they get by depending on a single pool of editors over long periods, among other perks. They also don’t have an easy way to work with each other, and a surprising amount of significant reporting ends up channeling disparate sources and expertise from many reporters into one piece.
None of that is unsolvable. I’m pretty sure that the Substack co-founders are thinking about that already, and I look forward to what they come up with. But I will say, just leaving it to an Upwork like gig market doesn't quite do the trick. What you want, when you stake your reputation on the way someone else helps phrase your thoughts, is a known quantity that is more likely to come when they are part of a full-time team.
I do think, though, that many people outside journalism may make the mistake of looking at a byline and thinking that articles are simply written by reporters and then published. That works at some blogs, but the quality of their writing and reporting suffers for it. (Just as mine is suffering now because no one else will read this before I press "post." ;)
The best writing and reporting emerges in the volleys between good writers and good editors. Many of the people reading your writing will have had the experience of getting their work critiqued by someone smart who has a good ear. But it’s different when you need someone to do that every day, multiple times a day. At the big publication, those are called editors (I know you know this, but I’m not sure all your readers do). I’m also not sure whether the overhead of editors makes sense with a Substack business model.
But a pool of reporters sharing a pool of editors can get a lot of value out of those editors fairly efficiently.
If Substack manages to reproduce that somehow, then that collaboration and those economies of scale will also inevitably reproduce journalistic cultures that some tribes will object to and oppose. (Is that what we’re aiming for? Another tribe? Why not? The West coast, at least the geographic one, does have WIRED. It did produce Hearst, for better or for worse.)
Those economies also shape the market, especially when Substack writers compete against publications partially subsidized by advertising. You can get the NYT for $8/mo. That’s a lot of bang for your buck. How many Substack newsletters will it buy? How can the Substackers compete against ad-subsidized writing without falling prey to the incentives or creating clickbait?
If I had to make a prediction, I’d say that some time soon, as Substack fragments the publication of written analysis even more, an aggregator of Substack writers will emerge. A Spotify or something (Superstack?), that gives them greater exposure in return for less money and the right to complain a lot. And while that will not exactly be a newspaper, it will have certain resemblances to a paper’s bundle. Another swing of the pendulum between the center and the margins…
It's interesting to think of writers managing their own P&L on an aggregated platform. Even more competitive than Gawker's leaderboard, if they're jostling to be on the home page.
Signal and Slack are great means of collaboration. I guess the question I did not ask clearly enough is: how do you get institutional support assigning responsibility to the editors on the backend for the quality of writing. (In an aggregator, are those seen as necessary?) If they're employees, that's like a traditional publication. If they're not, what could it look like? I'm not sure loose networks of writers lending each other their time intermittently will hold up under the constant, long-term pressure of publication.
I fished around for a Substack group, and there doesn't seem to be one, so I created one. But wonder if there's some larger blocker here. Not sure....this is the uncharted frontier.
I’m no business or writing expert, but perhaps a role for editor or subject matter expert on the platform. After the editor or SME contributes to an authors work, they get a fractional percentage of new and repeat subscriptions that come in after that? The issue becomes that this fractional percentage is finite, or that dividing a set percentage among contributors becomes less valuable as more people contribute to a single authors work.
Great piece. I'm very curious about what a new media fiefdom, which somehow suits the underlying shifts in technology and culture, while adhering to values that we presumably hold together, like an attempt at objectivity, would look like.
How is it different than what some big online media have now? Is it supposed to make money? And if so, how? And will its money mechanism give it different incentives than the fiefdoms it attempts to replace?
Frankly, I'm not sure that an op-ed by a screenwriter is the best example of east coast reporting. Editorial pages are famously wacky, and that's kind of the point of their existence, which makes them more similar to social media stars than either side of that analogy would like to admit.
There's a widespread dissatisfaction in tech right now with MSM and with the New York Times in particular. It's understandable, because the NYT is more critical of tech than it used to be (which seems to be part of and in a feedback loop with deeper cultural misgivings), and like other media, we see partisan currents within the paper writing biased stories in the guise of journalism. But that's just part of a larger (and in my opinion, invaluable) institution, that does the hard work of gathering and checking facts everyday.
How would a new media fiefdom do that better, while covering most newsworthy events? Getting to the facts, let alone the truth, is hard, and doing it on a daily basis across many topics is much harder. Doing it in a way that makes money is harder still. I suspect that many people in tech underestimate the difficulty of manuFACTuring, so to speak, the first contact between human understanding and as yet unwritten events.
Once you know what happened, send it as a prompt to GPT-3 and you'll get a great news story written in an inverted pyramid. But GPT-3 doesn't have feet on the ground yet. Those belong to biased humans.
It's an excellent question. And unlike some of my tech friends (who are even more anti-MSM than I am) I do think there's a place for investigative reporting that no number of substacks can replace.
Thought experiment: Let's say every writer at the NYT departs and starts their own Substack. What does the sum of those Substacks *not* have that the NYT does? Obviously, the name brand that gleans attention and inspires credibility, irrespective of the given author or topic.
That takes years to build. As the (nonetheless true) cliché goes: the best time to plan a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
What I hope is that the West Coast (which, to be clear, is almost a virtual concept rather than a geographic one) comes into its own as a source for media and commentary. To do that you start building institutions like Substack or Stripe Press that, over time, rise to the level of a HarperCollins or NYT (in updated form).
I just don't see how else to do it.
I was only on Substack for a few days before being blocked and censored by a writer. The same top down control mechanisms are still in play and it is so funny to watch: https://jennyhatch.com/2021/07/07/clint-watts-memoryholed-my-comments-fortunately-i-saved-them-anticipating-his-censorship-jennyhatch/
One of the more interesting problems for Substack writers and Substack itself to solve is that of recreating the collaboration that supports great writing and great journalism, as writers work under their own shingle.
So I think the answer to the question in your thought experiment is twofold: those hypothetical NYT writers don’t get collaboration or the economies of scale that they get by depending on a single pool of editors over long periods, among other perks. They also don’t have an easy way to work with each other, and a surprising amount of significant reporting ends up channeling disparate sources and expertise from many reporters into one piece.
None of that is unsolvable. I’m pretty sure that the Substack co-founders are thinking about that already, and I look forward to what they come up with. But I will say, just leaving it to an Upwork like gig market doesn't quite do the trick. What you want, when you stake your reputation on the way someone else helps phrase your thoughts, is a known quantity that is more likely to come when they are part of a full-time team.
I do think, though, that many people outside journalism may make the mistake of looking at a byline and thinking that articles are simply written by reporters and then published. That works at some blogs, but the quality of their writing and reporting suffers for it. (Just as mine is suffering now because no one else will read this before I press "post." ;)
The best writing and reporting emerges in the volleys between good writers and good editors. Many of the people reading your writing will have had the experience of getting their work critiqued by someone smart who has a good ear. But it’s different when you need someone to do that every day, multiple times a day. At the big publication, those are called editors (I know you know this, but I’m not sure all your readers do). I’m also not sure whether the overhead of editors makes sense with a Substack business model.
But a pool of reporters sharing a pool of editors can get a lot of value out of those editors fairly efficiently.
If Substack manages to reproduce that somehow, then that collaboration and those economies of scale will also inevitably reproduce journalistic cultures that some tribes will object to and oppose. (Is that what we’re aiming for? Another tribe? Why not? The West coast, at least the geographic one, does have WIRED. It did produce Hearst, for better or for worse.)
Those economies also shape the market, especially when Substack writers compete against publications partially subsidized by advertising. You can get the NYT for $8/mo. That’s a lot of bang for your buck. How many Substack newsletters will it buy? How can the Substackers compete against ad-subsidized writing without falling prey to the incentives or creating clickbait?
If I had to make a prediction, I’d say that some time soon, as Substack fragments the publication of written analysis even more, an aggregator of Substack writers will emerge. A Spotify or something (Superstack?), that gives them greater exposure in return for less money and the right to complain a lot. And while that will not exactly be a newspaper, it will have certain resemblances to a paper’s bundle. Another swing of the pendulum between the center and the margins…
Oh, I bet the founders are thinking about aggregation.
And as for writerly collaboration, well, that's what Signal/Slack are for....
It's interesting to think of writers managing their own P&L on an aggregated platform. Even more competitive than Gawker's leaderboard, if they're jostling to be on the home page.
Signal and Slack are great means of collaboration. I guess the question I did not ask clearly enough is: how do you get institutional support assigning responsibility to the editors on the backend for the quality of writing. (In an aggregator, are those seen as necessary?) If they're employees, that's like a traditional publication. If they're not, what could it look like? I'm not sure loose networks of writers lending each other their time intermittently will hold up under the constant, long-term pressure of publication.
Yeah, I think it's an issue.
I fished around for a Substack group, and there doesn't seem to be one, so I created one. But wonder if there's some larger blocker here. Not sure....this is the uncharted frontier.
Indeed. I’d love to be part of that group. Will email you.
I’m no business or writing expert, but perhaps a role for editor or subject matter expert on the platform. After the editor or SME contributes to an authors work, they get a fractional percentage of new and repeat subscriptions that come in after that? The issue becomes that this fractional percentage is finite, or that dividing a set percentage among contributors becomes less valuable as more people contribute to a single authors work.