© Leon Neal/Getty ImagesThe Stacks
Warzel commented on Twitter that he was "honestly terrified" of his move, but he needn't be.
In recent months, a slew of accomplished writers have migrated to Substack, including Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Matthew Yglesias, Heather Havrilesky, Roxane Gay, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss and others. Given the reader base Warzel formed at the Times, readers will likely accept his change of venue with the sort of enthusiasm they bestowed on the other runaways, and he'll be filling his moneybag with cash as readers line up to subscribe.
The rise of Substack — and of platforms of its competitors — signals a new juncture in journalism, one that combines the power and mystique of the byline with the editorial independence afforded by the blog. After being lectured forever about how information wants to be free, Substack is teaching us that not only will readers pay for top-drawer copy, but that the work of some writers was actually undervalued in the market before readers were given the opportunity to purchase journalism a la carte instead of from a prix fixe menu.
Substack has stampeded some elite media types into a panic. "Is Substack the Media Future We Want?" worried a New Yorker feature recently. New York Times media columnist Ben Smith analyzed the upheaval in his column, "Why We're Freaking Out About Substack." Yes, Substack looks like a revolution and smells like a revolution, but as many have noted, it's really a throwback to the origins of journalism in the Middle Ages, and the emphasis on who is writing the copy as opposed to what is being written can be traced to the late 19th century. Substack may be educating the industry about who adds the high value in journalism, writers or editors.
Journalists were largely anonymous figures to their readers until the 1890s, when the byline was first popularized. Given the ability to associate stories with a specific writer, readers turned such personages as Richard Harding Davis, Ambrose Bierce, Nellie Bly and Stephen Crane into stars. Whenever one of these stars filed their bylined copy, circulation would spike, and this prompted publishers to compete for their talents in hopes that they, too, could monetize their fame. Substack has done a similar thing, enlisting talents like Greenwald, the co-founder of the Intercept, to stock their newsletter business with popular copy. And the strategy seems to be working. The Financial Times estimates that a top-performer like Greenwald makes up to $160,000 a month after Substack takes its 10 percent of subscription revenue.
You could also say that Substack has restored life to blogs, which were all the rage two decades ago but started fading with the advent of social media — or, maybe more specifically, that it's solving a problem that blogs couldn't, which is how to make popularity profitable.
Like blogs, the Substack newsletter has made it fashionable once again for individual journalists to control their work. Like the blog before it, these newsletters cut traditional publications out of the relationship between writers and readers. The primary difference is how lucrative newsletters can be. Nobody ever made a fortune writing a blog, and the big salaries have always been limited to a few star bylines at traditional outlets. But now such bounty is available not only to writers of renown like Greenwald, Yglesias, Taibbi and Sullivan but an array of otherwise lesser known writers opining on subjects as esoteric and wonky as the NFL draft, history's relevance to current events and China policy. Since its founding in 2017, Substack has become the home to thousands of newsletters, assembled 500,000 paying subscribers, and now attracts 12 million users a month.
Newsletter writers can make their pages free or paid, or a mix of the two. Subscriptions cost $5 a month and upwards, depending on the writer. Substack provides hosting of the page and email blasts, and takes 10 percent from subscriptions and another 2.9 percent to cover credit card fees. If you don't charge, Substack charges nothing.
But this new journalistic juncture is about more than money and the return of blogging. Substack-like newsletters have struck a declaration of independence for writers who have longed for the day that they could wave bye-bye to their editors and shove them onto an ice floe and into the frigid current. By serving their copy directly to readers, newsletter writers displace editors from their high-priest functions in the temple of journalism. A Substack writer produces his copy without the usual interventions by editors. The writer no longer has to wait for his editor to approve a pitch before working on it. He doesn't have to wait for it to be edited. He doesn't have to sign off on or contest the edits. Nobody can demand a rewrite from him. It's important to differentiate the indy newsletters from the professional newsletters produced by places like POLITICO and the New York Times. Yes, they too are often delivered by email and serve subscribers mainly, but since they pass through the standard extruder manned by an editor, they're almost indistinguishable stylistically from the conventional news-outlet product.
A Substack gives a writer the lever and the fulcrum that says, "Here, see if you can move the world all by yourself." Most appealing to the heterodox writers who cover race, ethnicity, and gender, a Substack puts an end to writer's worries that a publication's diversity committee or its activist-rich Slack channel might sabotage the piece with internal protests if it doesn't conform to the greater staff's tastes and politics. Reportedly, such internal newsroom contention contributed to the departures of against-the-grain writers like Greenwald, Yglesias, Weiss and Sullivan from their last publications.
Substack is good for writers' pocketbooks. But are newsletters good for readers?
Partaking of a Substack column can be like drinking cow's milk straight from the teat instead of waiting for it to be pasteurized, homogenized and bottled by the dairyman. Like drinking raw milk, the reading experience comes with pluses and minuses. It's a rare Substack — even when written by a writer I admire — that wouldn't be twice as good half as long. Not that self-indulgence is always a sin. I'd rather read Greenwald in all his woolly, ragged glory than see him bottled up by an editor. If you like your copy groomed and pristine, copy-edited professionally and fact-checked, and locked down by logic, some Substacks will give you fits. Some Substackers do more meandering than writing (you know who you are, Yglesias), pursuing their argument as if taking the longest possible route to buy a jug of milk from a 7-Eleven that's only a block away from their door. Lots of Substacks read like lazy first drafts, probably because they are, taking forever to hit their marks, score their points and make their exit.
It's enough to make a professional lament the passing of the dictatorial editor. But to my astonishment, readers seem not to mind. Self-absorbed writing by Substack writers seems to have been no impediment in their acquisition of vast, paying audiences. The popularity of these windy works must be read as another blow against the cult of the editor. Substack readers seem to prefer imperfect and timely copy over slick and buttoned-down. The original impetus for concise copy might have had more to do with the scarcity of newsprint and the editors' efforts to economize it, than reader satisfaction. I'm old enough to remember an editor telling me that he had to cut my story because there wasn't enough "room" to run the entire submission. But now that the web has made serving a 1,000-word story as quick a process as serving a 10,000-word one, lots of writers would rather produce a mattress of words when a mere pillow might suffice. My friend Nick Gillespie suggests that as consumers have become more accustomed to products like meal kits, IKEA furniture, and other DIY products that require some assembly, readers have come to accept less than polished-perfect copy and are content to let their brains smooth out the corrugations. For these readers, Substack provides the perfect form.
None of what I've written should be read as endorsements of the Substack way, only as observations. I would never send all the editors to the tumbrels as part of a scheme to cleanse journalism of their influence. I was employed as an editor for more than two decades, and since changing teams in the second half of my career, I have rarely resisted an edit. I willingly accept changes unless an editor has introduced an error or made my copy worse. It's been my good fortune to work at places and freelance for publications that have treated me well. Plus, I like being a part of a larger publication, where I can draw on the expertise of smart colleagues in the newsroom. So, no, I do not crave the Substack life. (Disclosure: Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie, who is a fine journalist, approached me about joining his platform in 2018, but I declined the opportunity.)
But the fact that I've fared well in the system doesn't mean it's for everybody, especially writers like Sullivan and Weiss, who felt constrained at their "liberal" publications. But not all of the defections to Substack are about escaping editorial overlords. When Matthew Yglesias went to Substack, he accepted a $250,000 advance for his first year. Nobody, least of all Yglesias, had any idea of how popular paying readers would find his newsletter. Had he accepted the cut-of-the-revenue deal, he'd have netted up to $775,000 in his first year. With Yglesias' success as a guide, we can expect more premier writers to leave their publications for Substack. As they do, might some publishers decide that the power they've invested in editors to guide and control a copy is obsolete (I hope not) and sack the editor to make their outlets more like Substack — that is, a place where autonomous writers file whatever they like at whatever length they choose?
The big money Substack has thrown around serves as a market signal that the country's best writers have been exploited by their publications for eons. To pinch a phrase from Marx, Substack has proved that the best writers create "surplus value" that their employers have absconded with. Substack allows writers to reclaim something closer to their total value. This isn't the first writer goldrush in recent decades, though it may well prove to be the largest and longest lasting. In recent years, The Athletic has been paying top dollar to pry top sportswriters from their current gigs. Just a few years ago, Fusion wheeled out $300,000 to $500,000 to attract marquee journalists, as Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke wrote for WWD in 2017. During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, the web threw around a lot of silly money to recruit talent. And at the beginning of the 1990s, The National, a daily sports newspaper that quickly folded, made a bonfire of cash luring leading sportswriters into its pages. Like free agency in sports, each of those goldrushes improved the base salaries for the recruitable, which is a great thing for writers.
Substack might create a similar ripple effect, but I doubt many publications are going to pay writers more than $1 million a year, as Glenn Greenwald is making. And I'm confident mainstream publications don't have much to worry about if their most popular writers catch the newsletter fever and join the exodus. Many publications have strong benches, and their staffs can be easily replenished from below, where journalistic talent condenses in deep pools, like water in an aquifer, waiting to be tapped. Everybody is replaceable, even the stars who might ditch their day jobs for Substack.
Besides displacing editors, the rise of such non-conformist Substack writers as Sullivan, Weiss, Greenwald, John McWhorter, Jesse Singal and Yascha Mounk indicates that the editors working in conventional media may have drastically underserved unwoke readers. While Substack is much more than a hangout for political apostates, running writers who cover the espionage beat, Indiana politics, progressive politics, financial tech, humor, history and more, the popularity of the heterodox writers implies a hunger for the kinds of journalism most editors would rather not print. Editors, who have always billed themselves as the premier tastemakers and gatekeepers in the palace of journalism, have been shown up by Substack.
The growing influence of Substack shouldn't move us to a choice of either-or. You can enjoy conventionally edited publications and unfettered newsletters at the same time without being ridiculed for wanting it both ways. But there might also be a lesson for the big institutional media. Nobody expects newspaper and magazine publishers to replace conventional journalism with nothing but newsletter-style copy. But Substack has shown that boosting the best writers' salaries, creating publishing platforms free of meddlesome editors and allowing readers — not editors — to decide what to publish can be a winning business model. Substack has plugged into something urgent, something potent. The industry would be stupid not to get some of that.
Comment: 'The pen is mightier than the sword.' Substack is proving this metonymic to be true: no censorship, more lucrative!