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Sovereign writers and Substack

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Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#61

Post by ghaff »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #46
x0x0 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "now" is doing a lot of work there :) So also successful. Do you think there was really a time that being a really successful journalist didn't require some charisma and a talent for publicity? Maybe the publication handled some of those things, but it doesn't change that they were required.

Of course. Investigative journalism has little to do with building an audience of paying subscribers. When the newspaper handled the business end, the journalists could focus on the journalism. It wasn't called "loss leader" for nothing.

Newspapers were historically a bundle of only somewhat tangentially related things that you had to take, if not actually read, all together. The foreign bureaus and investigative journalism provided the prestige, sports a lot of readership, and classified ads the money. Of course, the Internet broke that bundle apart to a large degree.

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#62

Post by bhupy »

abhinav22 wrote: post #51
bhupy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess my questions are: - Does it have to appeal to "MOST" people for it to be a viable dividends-paying business? - Does it have to be the "landing page / YouTube of articles" in order to be a viable dividends-paying business?

Both these questions are related in the sense it reflects how large the audience needs to be to a viable business. Question is how much VC money has been burnt on it - perhaps it’s bootstrapped well and it can succeed at a much smaller scale; it’s definitely possible. However in the long run, it’s somewhat of an easily replicable stack / feature set, particularly as I assume that most highly successful writers would…

> Both these questions are related in the sense it reflects how large the audience needs to be to a viable business.

But as long as the unit economics are positive, why does the audience size matter? AFAIK, Substack's OPEX looks a lot more like traditional software/SaaS businesses and a lot less like Uber's or Amazon's.

You're right that Substack's functionality can be commoditized, but loads of successful dividends-paying businesses operate in commoditized spaces.

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#63

Post by bhupy »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #49
bhupy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what journalism has always been like, save for a few decades in one specific country (the US). The past few decades of supposed "objectivity" and "neutrality" in American journalism were a historical aberration. https://www.wired.com/story/journalism-isnt-dying-its-return...

Anti-discrimination laws, human rights, and democracy are also historical aberrations. But I think they're kind of worth keeping around. Perhaps getting accurate facts about the world is also important?

> Anti-discrimination laws, human rights, and democracy are also historical aberrations. But I think they're kind of worth keeping around.

Nazism was also a historical aberration, but that's certainly not worth keeping around. Just because some "good" things were historical aberrations, doesn't mean that all historical aberrations are "good".

> Perhaps getting accurate facts about the world is also important?

I don't think anybody disagrees with this. The central question is: is journalism the institution that should be responsible for getting accurate facts about the world? That's almost never been the case, and even today, isn't the case in most countries (including Western Europe). We typically use other institutions to suss out facts, including academia and peer-reviewed research. News articles published by mainstream outlets aren't peer-reviewed, and bias has existed in journalism since time immemorial. That was the point of my original response. Substack isn't "good" or "bad" for the future of journalism, it's "neutral", since it doesn't change the status quo all that much.

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#64

Post by WJW »

mc32 wrote: post #57
WJW wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably different audiences will prefer different writers, as they always have.

Yes but like food diet, is junk food more profitable or are staples more profitable? What should we aim for? If junk is more profitable, is that okay? Do we all jump on that wagon while the going is good, or do we think a minute about what is more fulfilling?

There is no "we" here, certainly not in the sense that "do we think a minute". People can choose for themselves just fine, and they'll do so whether I wring my hands about it or not. If you want to be worried about other people, go ahead but leave me out of it. :)

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#65

Post by jeffreyrogers »

mc32 wrote: post #57
WJW wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably different audiences will prefer different writers, as they always have.

Yes but like food diet, is junk food more profitable or are staples more profitable? What should we aim for? If junk is more profitable, is that okay? Do we all jump on that wagon while the going is good, or do we think a minute about what is more fulfilling?

Obviously trash sells and it always has ("The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience"), but some people care more about things like truth and style than they do about money.

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#66

Post by meheleventyone »

snicksnak wrote: post #14
ceilingcorner wrote: post #3

Of course things aren’t so simple; Sullivan, like several of the other names on that leaderboard, are, to put it gently, controversial. That he along with other lightning-rod writers ended up on Substack is more a matter of where else would they go? While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism as a w…

> I don't want the tactics of Kim Kardashian to be the model of a future journalist. Most mayor news outlets (including NYT) run branded/sponsored content. I doubt that you will see that on substack.

You absolutely will when people on the cusp of making a living use them to push themselves over that edge. As is pretty common on other content platforms.

Here it’s happening already: https://medialyte.substack.com/p/the-curious-emergence-of-th...

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#67

Post by tarkin2 »

Vaguely off topic, but why do so many programmers use substack and medium to write about programming? Why not use their own programming skills to create their own website, rather than consume a service?

I used to love visiting programmers' websites, where programmer's would use their skills to not only write, but create. Now it's largely a drab stream of medium posts.

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#68

Post by renewiltord »

tarkin2 wrote: post #67

Vaguely off topic, but why do so many programmers use substack and medium to write about programming? Why not use their own programming skills to create their own website, rather than consume a service? I used to love visiting programmers' websites, where programmer's would use their skills to not only write, but create. Now it's largely a drab stream of medium posts.

You can still go to programmers' sites where the software is written by the programmer as well as the content.

The answer to your question is the same as the one to "Why do software engineers use libraries?"

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#69

Post by organsnyder »

tarkin2 wrote: post #67

Vaguely off topic, but why do so many programmers use substack and medium to write about programming? Why not use their own programming skills to create their own website, rather than consume a service? I used to love visiting programmers' websites, where programmer's would use their skills to not only write, but create. Now it's largely a drab stream of medium posts.

Only so many hours in a day. Perhaps setting up and operating a blogging platform isn't how they'd prefer to use their time.

When I ran my own business, I had the skills to do everything myself: accounting, order fulfillment, everything. I created a kick-ass system that saved me hours of work for things like calculating and disbursing royalty checks (it was a publishing business). Sure, it was better than off-the-shelf software, but I would have been able to dedicate a lot more time to the core of my business—the part where I was creating truly unique value—if I had hired an accountant, or at least used off-the-shelf software.

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#70

Post by drcode »

tarkin2 wrote: post #67

Vaguely off topic, but why do so many programmers use substack and medium to write about programming? Why not use their own programming skills to create their own website, rather than consume a service? I used to love visiting programmers' websites, where programmer's would use their skills to not only write, but create. Now it's largely a drab stream of medium posts.

LOL I built my own blogging platform for my personal site, but I get constant nagging for not handling permalinks in the expected way and for never implementing RSS. (lisperati.com)
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