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Comment by drchopchop | Hacker News Reader

Why would Substack solve this? It's just a more refined Medium with better monetization opportunities. Being on Substack doesn't mean the author is trustworthy, only that they have content that people will engage with (and potentially pay for), which is still the same KPI you're referring to.

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Substack allows you to subscribe (paid) to an individual journalist or publication. They can then post long-form stories to your inbox. That gives them the opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with you where credibility matters.

At any rate, that is the argument. I don't think it will work, because buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive. Hell, buying it one paper at a time is too expensive. The better approach is the Apple News Plus or Google News one, where you pay a single subscription for a very wide range of outlets.... But, their idea isn't crazy.

> "buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive"

Yes and no. It is if you want to get all of your daily news that way. But if it's an area you care about and you're somewhat affluent, it's well worth the money. (I'd think a good chunk of HN e.g. has a subscription to Stratechery)

It's a workable strategy for a few extremely good journalists. But there are a lot of issues with it.

Societally, this is problematic in that it makes decent reporting a luxury good. Long-term, this is a problem because there's no institution where junior journalists can learn the trade. In terms of information, it's a problem because there'll likely be no way to get a wider overview of world news in that way.

See: the entire art world.

You can sell on a piece of art though.

Here are licensing the right to consume text without any ownership or ability to redistribute. It's more akin to Netflix.

And people are already complaining about having to pay too many aggregators, paying per TV episode is completely out of the question as the way forward.

I paid $50 for a year of Matt Taibbi. Literally the first time I have ever paid money for journalism, and it has been worth every penny.

I did too, until I realized that Taibbi is basically the exact same thing we are all railing against here. It quickly becomes clear that Taibbi puts out almost nothing but counter-outrage porn. Virtually every article was some variation on how the media is stoking public anger against wrongthink.

And it’s not that I think he’s wrong. I think he’s absolutely right. The problem is that it’s basically nothing but opinion pages from someone I already agree with. That’s not news, and it’s not journalism. The problem with modern journalism is that opinion columns seem to have completely overtaken plain, boring reporting. It’s text media outlets mirroring the strategies of 24 hour news networks, in which simply reporting the news is given an increasingly small amount of attention, in favor of “analysis” from pundits and panelists who basically tell an individual what to think. People simply find the outlet or panelist that most closely agrees with what they already feel.

Taibbi doesn’t fix this, he is literally just more of the same. He just does it with a less mainstream viewpoint that appeals to people like you and me.

I also subscribe to Taibbi. I have a slightly more positive impression than you.

Yes, it's true that his thing is meta-journalism with dollops of amusingly worded outrage - "the first pebbles from the towering Matterhorn of bullshit that was the Steele dossier" was an enjoyable sentence in a recent article.

But it isn't just opinion. He backs up his statements with references, facts, summaries of what's going on and generally puts what's happening in context, which is exactly what a journalist is meant to do. I can't possibly follow the whirlwind of immediately forgotten "scandals" that typify American political news, nor can I or do I want to spend all my time watching CNN or obsessively following other US news outlets. I'm not even in the US. But the summarisation of what's happening Taibbi does is useful to me because the meta-story of what's happening with the distribution of news is interesting and relevant. For instance, I learned about how the US media were ignoring the Hunter Biden story via Taibbi. I'm not interested in Hunter Biden but I am interested in the descent of the US media landscape into being an arm of the Democrats. That's what Taibbi (and Greenwald) are currently providing, and it's worth paying for.

> But it isn't just opinion. He backs up his statements with references, facts, summaries of what's going on and generally puts what's happening in context, which is exactly what a journalist is meant to do.

No it’s not. Most opinion pieces have some kind of facts or summaries included to make their argument. The difference between journalism and the newsroom is that they stop at the facts and the summaries, and opinions go on to tell you how you should interpret them (in the author’s view). That’s what Taibbi does. I too tend to agree with his opinions, but people here are confusing “agreeing with his opinions” with “he’s a much better journalist than those found in standard media outlets”. He shouldn’t be considered a journalist, as he exclusively writes opinion pieces.

I think you mean he shouldn’t be considered a reporter, which is the term for a journalist who reports the news with minimal interpretation. There are very few reporters left.

>buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive.

I think this closed view is partially do to how we consume media as a service vs. a cheap one time payment/view. I'm not sure if substack is a solution or if micropayments will ever kick off, but I don't see how it is more expensive to pay the journalist directly if the mass publishing mechanism is solved.

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. It may turn out that the "V" in MVP here necessarily required monetization, for those who see journalism as the search for truth, not the search for clicks, to take the leap of going indie. Certainly if that trend continues we ought to expect larger organization - where solo-indies merge into mini-guilds, and so on, hopefully to the point where these become large organizations comparable to the 'old' media companies before they shifted away from journalism. Certainly Taibbi and Greenwald could be the first "dyad" to collaborate within this alternative media universe, so that might give us a clue of what organizing principles this new world may operate under, with these new incentives.

Being on Substack solves the problem of censorship by way of one's editor or organization. It re-introduces the problem of unedited journalism; i.e journalism that isn't passed through a degree of peer review to ensure rigour. It seems as though it's no longer guarantee both full journalistic freedom and rigour at the same time.

The "peer review" being provided by most media outlets appears to be worse than useless, as Greenwald's experience shows. Typos and spelling errors can be fixed by machines for a very long time already. Editing for space is less necessary when writing for the infinitely long pages of the web - a good writer knows how much detail their audience wants better than an editor does. It's not clear why news has to be filtered through biased editors anymore when technology has eliminated space and distribution constraints.

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