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

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

#41

Post by misiti3780 »

Matt,

I have really enjoyed your books and all your articles over the years, especially about banking, corruption, and the financial crisis. i am curious if you have read the book 'The Chickenship Club) [https://www.amazon.com/Chickenshit-Club-Department-Prosecute...] and your thoughts on it?

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

#42

Post by MattTaibbi »

danso wrote: post #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.

So I started my career in "traditional" journalism, working for a nice little newspaper called the Moscow Times, but the problem there was they wouldn't let you write with humor or break certain formats. So I quit and ended up several times self-publishing by putting out newspapers, which is hilarious in context -- these days people just need to type something and upload it, but we used to have to painstakingly design every page, create huge metal plates, print off them, make giant stacks of newspapers, distribute them (I've even done the distribution on my own, in cars), just to be "self-published." Also I had to sell ads back in the day! With the internet came blogging, which is obviously much simpler but the problem, again, always comes back to representing a larger financial outlet, not wanting to clash with an editor or advertisers over material, having to haggle over what to write about and when. Substack is basically just the writer and the reader and it's very painless. I think in the future you'll see a lot of writers and media personalities breaking off and using this kind of format.

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

#43

Post by cjbest »

geverett wrote: post #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?

Re discovery: Yes!

We want the writers to succeed, and while it's ultimately up to them to write something good enough that people want to subscribe, getting discovered is something we can help with.

Having a place to feature them will help with this (though it's less important right now than e.g. helping free posts get shared.)

In fact, we have a super basic version of this that we wrote in 20 minutes here: https://www.substack.com/discover but we have a ton of plans on how to make it better - most importantly by focusing on the author & publication as the key element rather than the post.

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

#44

Post by MattTaibbi »

misiti3780 wrote: post #41

Matt, I have really enjoyed your books and all your articles over the years, especially about banking, corruption, and the financial crisis. i am curious if you have read the book 'The Chickenship Club) [ https://www.amazon.com/Chickenshit-Club-Department-Prosecute... ] and your thoughts on it?

So I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't read that book, but I imagine I've read almost all of Jesse's articles from that time period, as we were both covering essentially the same story. Along with Gretchen Morgenson of the Times, Jesse was one of the first reporters to start asking the question of why no one from the crisis era went to jail. I gather from the title alone that he traversed a lot of the same area I did in "The Divide," which was significantly about the pusillanimous Justice Department not wanting to take on complex financial cases. Jesse is a great reporter so I will definitely check it out.

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

#46

Post by throwaway22375 »

rodion_89 wrote: post #40
throwaway22375 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The excerpts linked from reddit are stuff that was published in the Exile. Are you saying they’re fake? Can I get a link to the debunking? Thanks.

His wiki[1] says "Women portrayed in the book have gone on record to defend Taibbi, stating that none of the sexual harassment portrayed in the book ever happened."[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi [2] https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/12/the-destructi...

Alright. The Paste Magazine piece is enough to raise doubts for me. I deleted my comment.

Thanks for the links, everybody.

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

#47

Post by MattTaibbi »

cyrilsam wrote: post #31

1. How scalable is the pivot to subscriptions and how does it effect democracy? 2. Can the news-media organizations continue with the kind of pre-internet organization that they continue to do? What are the changes required? 3. What does a news-media organization look like in the age of hyper connectivity and real time information exchange? How is it different from the pre-internet news organization? What is the new…

So just to take on some of this -- the big problem with the old media model is that old media made its money on distribution. When you bought a newspaper you were mostly buying the expense and time they put in to making and delivering the news to you (the trucks, the paperboys, the newsstands, etc). Or you were advertising on a local TV station that had a quasi-monopoly with one of the few FCC licenses in an area. With the internet media firms no longer were really controlling distribution. Today 75% of the news comes from two distributors, Google and Facebook. So media has to figure out a new way to survive. People in the business have pored over this problem for decades. I don't see any way that it works without subscriptions. Any ad-based model is going to result in denuded clickbait-style coverage. The advantage the modern system has is that basically anyone can garner a large audience overnight, provided they're good at what they do. There's no middlemen, which means reduced costs, which means an opportunity for more independent reporting. We'll see. I'm guardedly optimistic and hope that companies like Substack will take off.

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

#50

Post by MattTaibbi »

ilconsigliere wrote: post #45

What tools do you use to do your work? What tools/processes are essential to your workflow?

My father, who is also a reporter, used to have one important tool, a rolodex (for those too young to know, this used to be a rolling phone card file). Every night he came home and did a thing he called a "phone attack," where he randomly called all his sources -- not for stories, but just to touch base, chat, listen to what's going on in their lives. This is basically all you need to do to be a good reporter, maintain a lot of relationships with people in different walks of life. It's hard work but very rewarding. If you don't have people with their ears to the ground, you're lost. So like my father I try to regularly stay in touch with all sorts of people, and never to call a source for a favor if I haven't recently called socially, or just to check in. People hate feeling used.
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