Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video]

#31

Post by ksdale » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #28

julianapostate wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liberals complain about the cotton piece and the editor resigns 4 days later. Scott Alexander deletes his blog and NYT has pretended nothing happened.

The editor resigned after tweeting that the article was carefully vetted, then admitting that he hadn't actually read the piece himself. That is basically dereliction of duty considering that the piece is from a sitting US senator advocating for military intervention against American citizens. Should he have stayed on in that job? It shouldn't come as a surprise that that topic would cause more public consternation t…

Do you think that he wouldn't have resigned if he had read the piece beforehand? Would that have changed their decision to publish? They also demoted the editor who did the actual editing. It doesn't seem like it's obviously journalistic malpractice to publish bad and wrong opinions that come from US Senators, even if the opinions are very bad and wrong. The objection to the piece was to its contents, something the editor has finite control over if they're going to publish at all.

Certainly it's debatable whether that piece should have been published, but the stories about failures of professionalism sound like reasons they came up with after they published something that plenty of other major newspapers would have published, and discovered that their readership and employees really didn't like it.

To be clear, I think it's totally fine that the organization runs that way, but I think it's wrong to put them on a pedestal.

Re: Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video]

#32

Post by RNCTX » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

davis wrote: post #30

rchaud wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Medium.com all over again. Sharecropping on someone else's platform. It gets you exposure at first, and some level of trust; back in 2012/13 when Medium was new, the content was pretty high quality. Now, it's a wasteland of "here's my two cents on something that has been covered in far more detail elsewhere" type blogspam. The same with happen with Substack. They need to grow, just like every other VC-funded sta…

It really is the irony of entire Substack platform: the inspiration of it is Stratechery yet one of Ben Thompson's most consistent themes (aggregation theory) makes it clear how precarious of a situation it can be when you rely on another company for your audience reach and when it comes to establishing a brand. Granted, I do think Substack is more of a platform than an aggregator compared to Facebook. But people tha…

> but their progress with site features has been... well, underwhelming.

As is Patreon, as well. Their website is slow and a pain to use. They just stopped publishing direct, hard links to S3 in subscription RSS feeds late last year or early this year (I forget which). They don't support generating per-user or per-timeframe affiliate/coupon URLs, despite suggesting that to their users as a paid content option.

Ghost made a big deal in comments on this site awhile back about "how much work" was put into integrating with Patreon in regard to generating password-less links, but really... Patreon generates password-less links already, as do a hundred email marketing apps, not rocket science. It'd take someone about 5 seconds to find a Django tutorial explaining how to generate one-time links on youtube, I would wager.

All of these platforms suffer more from their founders trying to be what they're not to some degree, in my opinion. A marketing platform run by people who aren't experienced in marketing isn't going to do well. Why do we expect that a publishing platform run by a journalist or an artist is going to do well?

Re: Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video]

#33

Post by _b8r0 » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

Kye wrote: post #3

They're not really independent as long as they're stuck on Substack's domain. You can export your list and maybe get some % to move to another newsletter host, but any links to past newsletters will forever be on their domain. Substack keeps saying "eventually" on using your own, but with no clear timeline or real justification for not launching with it. Same reason I won't touch Hey.

I set up Tales From The Dork Web[1] on Substack because I wanted somewhere to write non-commercially, and Medium was a cess-pit.

I fully expect one day for Substack to end up like Medium, but having spoken to quite a few of the people there on all kinds of matters, they're fighting against it really hard.

When the inevitable does happen, I'll take Tales From The Dork Web elsewhere. Until then, It's the first non self-hosted platform I've used for writing that I'm actually ok with, and I'm pretty functionally paranoid.

[1] - https://thedorkweb.substack.com/

Re: Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video]

#34

Post by ksdale » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

dsparkman wrote: post #22

Evidlo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or possibly standards in journalism have fallen and this is the next step.

I would say most of what passes for journalism, is no longer journalism. Journalism is about passing on the who-what-when-where-why. Factual information to the public. You see very little of that these days. Too many opinion in basic article.

People are always mentioning Gell-Mann amnesia as well. I think this is one area that independent writers, especially ones who have a lot of experience in a particular industry, can add a lot. They can write about events, technology, and scholarship, from the perspective of an expert. They can be better at passing on the who-what-when-where-why because they know enough to not just have to take anyone's word for it, and if they're good, they're confident enough in their position that they don't have to signal any sort of ideological credentials to have their facts accepted, so they don't signal. Obviously this is an ideal, but I think it's a very plausible one.

Re: Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video]

#35

Post by _xnmw » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

The problem with "independent journalism" is the loss of a shared coherent narrative about the world. There's just no shared context. Many don't even watch/read the news anymore. Earlier this year I introduced my grandma to YouTube, but I was surprised how fast she got hooked and stopped watching conventional news altogether, so much so that she hadn't even heard of the George Floyd protests. Whereas previously I used to talk with my grandma about stuff on the news, that stopped after she started watching YouTube, because her channel subscriptions do not intersect with mine, so we have nothing in common to talk about.

It's a sort of regression to pre-modern tribalism where only "local" events matter to you -- except "local" means whatever independent content creators you are subscribed to, and their respective tribes. While this was always the case for much of the developing and pre-modern world, this is a new state of affairs for the West. The educated Western public is now regressing to a state of ignorance about global affairs to the extent that they have no idea what "global affairs" even means, all the while believing that they have a "better" worldview due to their "woke" independent analysis. The real problem is the loss of a shared context and common knowledge with which to engage in conversation with people around you.

Re: Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video]

#36

Post by clairity » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

_xnmw wrote: post #35

The problem with "independent journalism" is the loss of a shared coherent narrative about the world. There's just no shared context. Many don't even watch/read the news anymore. Earlier this year I introduced my grandma to YouTube, but I was surprised how fast she got hooked and stopped watching conventional news altogether, so much so that she hadn't even heard of the George Floyd protests. Whereas previously I use…

why conceive of it as a problem? heterogeneity of thought and view lends more engaging and interesting conversations, new learnings and perspectives, and a more resilient and innovative society to boot, even if it's more of a challenge. it's surely better that you have to work at a conversation than have some bland homogeneity of thought for faux-comfort bubbles.

comfort is entirely orthogonal to journalism anyway. it's purpose is to (mis-)inform, not to entertain and provide bonding fodder. you have plenty of other, better (media) avenues for that (movies, tv, etc).

Re: Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video]

#37

Post by clairity » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

cjbest wrote: post #27

groby_b wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that previous attempts were "how can we get news readers to pay", and current attempts are "what news do people who pay for news want". And in general, if you pay for news, you want opinionated voices you can deeply trust, and whose bias you're familiar with. That's not possible on an aggregated news platform, since that by its nature will try to be all things to a fairly large group of people - you need a…

I think this is right. > whose bias your are familiar with I This is fair, but there is a positive version which is "whose worldview you understand, and find interesting/valuable" Every person and organization comes with some kind of bias - even if part of that bias is "try to be clear eyed and tell the truth". The advantage of subscribing directly to writers is that you get to choose explicitly who you want to trust…

while your description of the phenomenon may be somewhat accurate for some subset of news consumers, the implication that this is a reasonable position is disturbing.

truth and trust do intertwine deeply in the subconscious, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use our conscious brains to disentangle them when it leads us astray.

we should seek a variety of reasonable perspectives, especially including differing ones to our own. trust the reasonable, even if disagreeable. that's what get us to truth, not a flight to homogeneity.

and that's the lament here--it's getting harder and harder to find reasonable perspectives because every media outlet, even the venerates like nytimes, are leaning hard into partisanship and tribalism.

Re: Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video]

#38

Post by clairity » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #13

ksdale wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This perspective seems almost exactly wrong, considering what's been happening with the NYT lately.

Nothing much has been happening with the New York Times lately. Most of the conflict around the New York Times is actually exactly said fringe groups being offended because the NYT pisses them off in one way or the other. Liberals complain about the Cotton piece, someone complains about Scott Alexander being doxxed, and someone on the right probably thinks the NYT has been overrun by communists. Which actually proves…

you can still find some good investigative journalism at nytimes here and there, but most of the daily news pieces are full of opinion and partisanship. the editorializing over corona/covid, blm, and the election provide the most obvious examples, but you can see it across world news, cultural pieces, and everything in-between.

the cotton piece was published exactly to generate outrage and partisanship, not to be informative, and it backfired--a lack of editorial integrity, not an issue with the offensive content itself.

Re: Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video]

#39

Post by coffeeling » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #8

simonsarris wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue pretty much the exact opposite, writers on substack are a step above journalism. NYT especially is an advertising company that realized people also pay to have their own views confirmed. (And when opinion columnists occasionally don't do that, lots of people comment that they're going to unsubscribe! Further proving it to them. The product isn't what's true, its whatever makes number go up.) This is obv…

yes, you've just done better investigative journalism than most major news reporters these days, who hew so closely to the party line regardless of merit. i can hardly read nytimes (or listen to npr) anymore because of it. alas, they've traded away their fragile reputations for soulless clicks and cash.

When I was hunting for a paper to read, WSJ seemed like one of the only ones that felt like it actually tried doing journalism. They definitely have their own lean, but it's one of the few papers that doesn't make me go "blah, this is pointless/uninformative" or want to hurl.