AMA with Substack and Matt Taibbi about a new business model for journalism • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by cjbest » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

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…

I can give the Substack take on this.

1. We think it's very scalable. The value of attention has flipped - you used to get bored and need to fill your time, now your time is the last scarce resource, so it makes sense to pay to use it more wisely. We see early adopters doing this happily now, but we think it will become the norm.

We also think it will be good for democracy. The incentives of ad supported social media encourage clickbait, cheap outrage, and hyper-partisanship. Subscriptions reward thoughtfulness and deep value.

The one thing I worry about is too much exclusivity. If we landed in a place with really high subscription prices and only the privileged few getting access to good information that wouldn't be ideal, but that is avoidable.

2. Mostly they will have to change. Some will be successful.

3. The new model is readers paying writers directly. The difference at internet scale is that you can reach everybody in the world, and therefore you can be more successful with a much more specific topic/audience. Also because of software, you can start doing it as an individual writer in an afternoon.

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

#52

Post by dang » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

masfjo wrote: post #26

throwaway22375 wrote: post #24

[Deleted]

This was already debunked dumbass

Please don't post this way, regardless of how bad another comment may be. Even if you're right (as in this case I believe you are), it damages the container here.

If you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the site rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

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

#53

Post by one4morrow » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 6:04 PM UTC

Hello I am CEO of a Texas NPO and doing research for a nationwide initiative to advocate for parents to test their minor children without the child's knowledge for drug use. Would you consider donating a copy of this fine work in-kind and allowing us to quote it with citations on a national scale? Also, I love the business model! Steve Morrow MBA MA

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

#54

Post by cjbest » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 6:07 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #38

cjbest wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt is a publisher on the Substack platform. We take a 10% cut of his subscription revenue. Because he is an established author, and we're really excited about this new format of serialized fiction, we have also been putting extra product development and publicity effort behind his publication. We think of this as Doing a Thing that Doesn't scale, as in http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Thanks for answering! Does Substack compensate him in any other way besides tailoring features to his work?

On Substack, readers pay writers directly. The writers are independent. We take a cut of the subscription revenue, which is the same in this case as for others.

We think this aligns our interest with the writers interest, the same way that the subscription model aligns the writer with the reader.

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

#55

Post by badcede » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

throwaway22375 wrote: post #46

rodion_89 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Raise doubts" is a bit stingy. Here is what one of the allegedly-harrassed women had to say (in the Paste article): “These claims that Matt would do this stuff are ridiculous,” she said. “I left The eXile because we started dating, and Matt was worried about impropriety. He didn’t even ask me out at work! Matt is a fundamentally decent and kind person.”

The smear seems to me to have been completely refuted on the facts, and there's a second issue: if it hadn't been, there's no way those mainstream publications would have retracted it en masse (especially not given the social climate around that topic). When was the last time they all did that? It's practically a magic trick to get them to do that.

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

#56

Post by Quigley13 » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 6:09 PM UTC

Question: Why is the price of a subscription significantly higher than the price of a book? Serious question. I read the first chapter and found it quite interesting and I have been considering subscribing, but one of the main reasons that I did not subscribe was that it seemed like the price would end up being much higher than the price for a book. I do like the fact that most of the money goes to the author.

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

#57

Post by MattTaibbi » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

Quigley13 wrote: post #56

Question: Why is the price of a subscription significantly higher than the price of a book? Serious question. I read the first chapter and found it quite interesting and I have been considering subscribing, but one of the main reasons that I did not subscribe was that it seemed like the price would end up being much higher than the price for a book. I do like the fact that most of the money goes to the author.

Well, you'll probably end up getting two books over the course of the year, or something on the order of it -- This book is likely to be finished by September, and then I'll be starting on something new (I have a couple of projects I'm working on now). So over the course of 12 months, it will work out to be quite a lot of stuff. Thanks in any case for taking a look.

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

#58

Post by cjbest » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

KevinoftheLion wrote: post #49

Will Substack be strictly a written newsletter platform or will it allow a hybrid approach including picture, audio, video, comments, etc. ?

We'll definitely look for ways to make the product better for readers and writers.

You can already add pictures. We are testing comments for paid subscribers on a couple of publications (you heard it here first!) And that other stuff is definitely interesting.

What will not change is that the experience for the reader will stay really simple - Sign up, and everything you need shows up in your email. Also the model will stay focused on letting readers pay writers directly for high quality content, because that's the magic.

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

#59

Post by cwkoss » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

one4morrow wrote: post #53

Hello I am CEO of a Texas NPO and doing research for a nationwide initiative to advocate for parents to test their minor children without the child's knowledge for drug use. Would you consider donating a copy of this fine work in-kind and allowing us to quote it with citations on a national scale? Also, I love the business model! Steve Morrow MBA MA

> to advocate for parents to test their minor children without the child's knowledge for drug use

This seems kind of overbearing. Why do think this is something important to advocate for?

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

#60

Post by jawns » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

Former magazine/newspaper editor here. (Disclosure: I briefly worked as a copy editor at a Rolling Stone sister publication, but never met Matt.)

One potential criticism of this sort of subscription business model is that it increases the echo-chamber effect, where people only subscribe to writers whose opinions they agree with. How do you answer that criticism?