Newsletters could be the next (and only) hope to save the media

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.

What’s interesting about newsletters is that consumers are willing to pay for them. While blogs have never really figured out monetization (apart from ads), Substack alone claims more than 50,000 paying subscribers.

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

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.