I graduated from college with a journalism degree in 2008. And since then there has been an elusive dream of "micropayments" helping fund journalism. The idea was that you'd kick a dollar or two to every article you read and everyone would be happy.

“I think writers have always realized their own value; there just weren't a lot of options in the post-2008 recession for how to make good on it,” says Anne Helen Peterson, who writes the newsletter Culture Study. “But all of this feels very cyclical to me. The economy tanks, writers get laid off from their publications, writers go freelance,... See more

In the wake of the Summer of Substack, the novelty of launching a newsletter where readers pay directly for your work has given way to the reality of, well, keeping that newsletter up. And keeping those readers happy. And finding new ones when, inevitably, some of those readers decide they’re kind of over you (nicely termed as “churn”). Inevitably,... See more

Times are changing for writers. There’s been a recent wave who’ve stopped contributing to outlets and moved to newsletters like this, such as myself. To give some insight into what’s happening, the following is a postmortem of my decade-long career writing nonfiction for well-known media outlets like The Atlantic or The Daily Beast. 

The real issue is not that writers are greedy or that readers are cheap, but that we’re all trapped in a system where cultural production has been so devalued that $5/month feels simultaneously like an insultingly small amount to pay someone for their labor and completely unsustainable when you’re already being asked to subscribe to twenty other

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