THE NEW YORKER IS THE LATEST LEFTIST OLD MEDIA REDOUBT UNCOMFORTABLE WITH FREE SPEECH AND A DIVERSE INTERNET: Is Substack the Media Future We Want?
Readers of magazines, newspapers, and many Web sites, which publish established writers alongside emerging ones, automatically encounter new voices; on Substack, the most successful newsletters are almost always written by people who have already cultivated an audience at traditional publications or built up a following elsewhere. (I learned about “Maybe Baby” via the Instagram Explore algorithm.) Many of these writers, like Yglesias, consolidated their reputations in the previous two decades, as bloggers, before leveraging that work into book deals or columns at traditional outlets; now, having built large followings, they are working as free agents. Substack is a natural fit for the influencer, the pundit, the personality, and the political contrarian. It’s debatable whether this represents “a better future for news.” But it’s great business for Substack.
The durability and sustainability of the digital-newsletter model remain to be seen. Carving out new ways for writers to make money from their work is surely a good thing: the United States lost sixteen thousand newsroom jobs this year, and many mainstream publications have struggled to overcome issues like discrimination, clubbiness, and prohibitively low compensation. But whether Substack is good for writers is one question; another is whether a world in which subscription newsletters rival magazines and newspapers is a world that people want. A robust press is essential to a functioning democracy, and a cultural turn toward journalistic individualism might not be in the collective interest.
Related: “The New Yorker, American weekly magazine, famous for its varied literary fare and humour. The founder, Harold W. Ross, published the first issue on February 21, 1925, and was the magazine’s editor until his death in December 1951.” No word yet if Ross checked to see if his magazine would or wouldn’t be “in the collective interest” before launching it.