I'll just tell you why I won't pay for this, but would pay for something like the NY Times or my local newspaper. I care to know what's going on, in general. I'm not a new junky, but I read headlines from a bunch of different places, and sometimes the entire article. Paying for a place with original reporting on a bunch of different topics appeals to me. What's that old saying, a mile wide and an inch deep? That works for me.
Paying to read one person write about one topic... not so much. I already get a bunch of free newsletters from a bunch of different people on a bunch of different platforms. Someone would have to be REALLY special for me to pay to read their emails. I can't imagine there's more than one person like that.
That's just me, of course, there's probably enough people out there that are willing to pay for a bunch of special emails to keep substack going.
Then, when I want someone's take on something, from someone I trust, I get it from substack. Eg. Matthew Yglesias on policy, Noah Smith on finance/economics, etc.
In contrast, most big newspapers seem to me to be pushing opinion masked as fact. They never actually lie, but they are selective in what they represent and imply connections where there are none.
I still read NY Times as my default. They have a lot more soft news than they used to but their reporting is still top notch. They've taken a turn for being more direct in their language and not tap-dancing around political double-speak but I think it's appropriate. My other go-to is NPR and local NPR affiliates.
The huge players (Sullivan, Taibbi, Greenwald, etc) may be able to continue on their own, but I just don't think there will be enough revenue for every journalist to make a good living with a personal substack.
I wonder how you'll find out about stuff you didn't know you needed to care about. I feel like this approach pushes us all deeper into our in-groups and away from a larger sense of community.
I also wonder what will be lost in terms of collaboration and oversight.
Hacker News
Who decides “what I need to care about”? The editors of NYTimes? I remember when they decided we needed to worry about WMDs in Iraq.
The major media businesses have built their business models around catering to in-groups. And collaboration and oversight within these organizations is focused on shaping (even policing) content for their target audience.
The eclectic tastes of individual writers - without the oversight and peer pressure - seem less likely to rigidly cater to a particular in-group.
Even even better: writers get paid with fewer middlemen, and writers can get paid proportionally to their work's readership.
The downside: sometimes the pooled model helps subsidize writers who do important work, but perhaps work that is insufficiently popular to attract paid readers...who funds that type of investigative journalism?
A good analogy might be a university - the EMBA, CS, Applied Sciences departments end up subsidizing the humanities departments. This is good. Classics are important. So is literature.
I know news organizations like to claim they unselfishly use their money to do God's Work.
And I know some of that happened. But I also know people like to exaggerate their civic mindedness.
It's super hard for people to internalize that they actually don't care about stuff, what they care about is their appearance. The people making real impacts are non or not for profit organizations that battle corporations in court and sue them for things like pollution. Journalists are worthless.
There is a lot of commentary on the news, but the news itself still comes from elsewhere.
I haven't seen 'A bomb went off in xxx today, as such and such claimed responsibility,' if that's what you mean by news but frankly that comes from the AP Wire for most traditional news organizations as well