Unbundling Journalism | Chris Best on Venture Stories

It’s possible to build a structure that aligns incentives for readers and writers and doesn’t depend on click-bait or outrage articles

Medium is basically doing the job of a legacy publication and acting as the middleman which doesn’t let readers and writers connect

On Substack, writers can directly email their audience. Medium is still figuring out their business models; they initially tried ads but now use a subscription model

On Substack, you own your email list. You have the autonomy to transfer to other sites.

News companies lost a ton of revenue because platforms such as Facebook could deliver more targeted ads and consequently companies shifted their ad money towards social media platforms

The conversion rate for paid subscribers is about 10% so if you have 10,000 readers, about 1,000 will pay for your work

The internet both helped and hurt journalism

The business model for writers is dead. Writers write to please social media algorithms and advertisers instead of their audience.

“I think that there’s a future we could build that would be better than anything we’ve seen in the past”