Writing for outlets isn't worth it anymore

Second, and I’m going to be brutally honest with you here, unless you really love the craft and process of writing, the path to becoming an independent, successful, widely read writer on the internet is going to frustrate the absolute shit out of you. Writing online requires an unrelenting commitment to consistency. Writing online means tolerating

... See more

What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing--or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept--and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of “thinking through,” to which subscribers are ... See more

Platforms like Substack have enabled the best journalists to leave their job, but it’s also put writers on a hamster wheel with a weekly publishing cadence, where they may be making less than they thought.

I like to say that I write about media generally and journalism specifically because the industry is a canary in the coal mine when it comes to the impact of the Internet: text shifted from newsprint to the web seamlessly, completely upending the industry’s business model along the way.Of course I have a vested interest in this shift: for better or... See more