Is Substack the Media Future We Want?

In its variety, the Substack corpus resembles the blogosphere. It is produced by a mix of career journalists, bloggers, specialists, novelists, hobbyists, dabblers, and white-collar professionals looking to plump up their personal brands. The company has tried to recruit high-profile writers, offering (to a select few) health-care stipends, design ... See more

Tim and Nina Zagat, who began printing “The Zagat Survey,” a collection of crowdsourced restaurant reviews, in 1979

Charles Schwab, the financial-services company, began as “Investment Indicator,” a newsletter first published in 1963.

By piloting programs, like the legal-defense fund, that “re-create some of the value provided by newsrooms,” as McKenzie put it, Substack has made itself difficult to categorize: it’s a software company with the trappings of a digital-media concern.

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.

His beachhead may very well be a paid newsletter . . . but the newsletter is just one SKU. . . . There could be a podcast SKU. A speaking fee SKU. A book deal SKU. A consulting SKU. A guest columnist SKU. And so on.”

A Substack newsletter is both a product and a portfolio: a way to make money, but also a venue for displaying personality, intelligence, and taste.

Yglesias’s newsletter, “Slow Boring,” has a readership that includes more than six thousand paid subscribers, and he is making twenty-seven thousand dollars a month

The “passion economy” thesis assumes that an audience will want everything a creator brings to market, the way viewers of the “Rachael Ray” show will often buy Rachael Ray cookbooks and cookware. But starting a newsletter does not immediately lead to speaking engagements, and not all writers can generate multiple distinct products. Yglesias told me... See more