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AMA with Substack and Matt Taibbi about a new business model for journalism

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21–30 of 164 posts

Re: AMA with Substack and Matt Taibbi about a new business model for journalism

#23
Hi Matt, thanks for taking questions. You've been around media since its "olden" days and have had success on a variety of traditional and online platforms. How does Substack -- or more generally, newsletters -- compare to other ways you've tried to self-publish, such as blogging? Both in terms of finding/engaging an audience, to the creation/production process.

Re: AMA with Substack and Matt Taibbi about a new business model for journalism

#25
post #19

What genres currently are outperforming cryptocurrency newsletters?

Honestly, we are seeing a lot of strength in the crypto newsletters on Substack and we love them. There are plenty of genres that are out-performing some of them – from absurdist humor to bankruptcy industry coverage to foreign policy – but the truth is that the writer matters more than the subject. People subscribe to writers they trust. Those reader-writer relationships are key in this world.

Re: AMA with Substack and Matt Taibbi about a new business model for journalism

#27

How did you guys settle on "Substack"? I only ask because Substack is a really well known handle for one of the most prolific Node ecosystem contributors, and I feel like you guys are going to run into a lot of SEO pain dealing with that.

We subscribe to the pg take on naming. We went through a couple of options we like, and Substack was the one we could get the .com for. It's a Stack for Subscription publishing. We didn't realize about the node developer with the Twitter handle; hopefully it's different enough that it's not a pain for either of us.

See http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

Re: AMA with Substack and Matt Taibbi about a new business model for journalism

#28
Have you finished the whole novel already (and just publishing chapter by chapter) or are you writing and changing as you go?

Also, this might make more sense for non-fiction work but what are your thoughts on letting a book evolve over time? So the writer updates and changes the content as s/he learns new things (and obviously lets readers know when edited).

Re: AMA with Substack and Matt Taibbi about a new business model for journalism

#29

How did you guys settle on "Substack"? I only ask because Substack is a really well known handle for one of the most prolific Node ecosystem contributors, and I feel like you guys are going to run into a lot of SEO pain dealing with that.

It also sounds too techie-sounding for the average writer, versus something like "TinyLetter". Though I guess they're used to it with things like "blog", "Tumblr", and "pod/vodcast"

Re: AMA with Substack and Matt Taibbi about a new business model for journalism

#30
Hey Matt, I've been a reader since the days of the Exile. Just digging into your new book on Substack thanks to this thread!

Chris and Hamish: do you plan to introduce a discovery option (like the App Store) for people to find who is on Substack, or are you expecting the writers to market their work independently?

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