3. Media needs subscriber governance: Subscriptions are mostly pitched as giving access to content. You pay so you can get around the annoying paywall. But the increased familiarity of paying for content will also lead to the desire to give more feedback on it. Substacks have comment sections and Discords where a sole proprietor has to answer to... See more
Yet I find myself asking one thing over and over again: is it really possible to build a long-term community modelled on the "Ownership Economy", without crushing the entire effort before it even begins under the weight of the "money game"?
Times are changing for writers. There’s been a recent wave who’ve stopped contributing to outlets and moved to newsletters like this, such as myself. To give some insight into what’s happening, the following is a postmortem of my decade-long career writing nonfiction for well-known media outlets like The Atlantic or The Daily Beast.