Tendenci@s | Ismael Nafría | Substack

Newsletters go back at least as far as the Middle Ages, but these days, with full-time jobs at stable media companies evaporating—between the 2008 recession and 2019, newsroom employment dropped by 23 percent—Substack offers an appealing alternative.

- Nano- and anti-influencers

some of the best newsletters offer “a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of ‘thinking through,’ to which subscribers are invited.”

Newsletters are booming right now: since the pandemic started, the number of readers and ‘active writers’ on Substack have both doubled, and other providers such as Mailchimp have seen similar spikes in users. Newsletter platforms are attracting big names: Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, New York Magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan and Buzzfeed’s Anne ... See more

Everything is multi-platform and multimedia. Not just journalist-personalities, but every magazine issue, every feature package, every article. The article is just the intellectual property made to be leveraged in as many spaces as possible. The presentation has to be optimized in every venue: You need good Instagram pinned posts, whether you’re a ... See more

The rise of newsletters is a tiny part of a more considerable shift around discovering, filtering, and consuming content online. On a more macro level:-Content supply is getting unbundled with the meteoric rise of individual creators.Trust in institutions is dwindling. [Pew Research]-We're consuming knowledge in more formats than ever before: Tweet... See more