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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

#61

Post by Quigley13 »

MattTaibbi wrote: post #57
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.

I appreciate your response. I will think again about subscribing. I would love to get hooked on books the way that I seem to get hooked on mediocre television like Game of Thrones and Westworld. I think it would definitely be better than reading the news every day.

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

#62

Post by one4morrow »

Hello Matt I posted this before so forgive duplication if the other came through? I am CEO of a Texas NPO that is starting a nationwide initiative to advocate that parents drug test their minor children without the child's knowledge to eliminate plausible deniability and move through the process to a higher than average possibility of success, intervention. I am doing website content research now and love the work you are doing. Question: would you consider allowing us to use some of your writing here (with full citations) as website content to illustrate some of the inherent problems, dangers and probable outcomes?

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

#63

Post by MattTaibbi »

jawns wrote: post #60

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?

I think the exact opposite is true. The problem with the “one click free” universe of tons of free content is that the reader naturally will search out - or be sought out, by algorithms - material he or she agrees with. That consumer takes less time to investigate alternative views and has less patience - something less mentally taxing is just a click away. When you pay, you’re making a commitment, and I think people both have higher expectations and are making a more reasoned, careful choice. We’ll see how it goes, but I think the subscription model is more likely to produce cool/experimental material than any model that tries to game Google/FB algorithms

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

#64

Post by cjbest »

MattTaibbi wrote: post #63
jawns wrote: post #60

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?

I think the exact opposite is true. The problem with the “one click free” universe of tons of free content is that the reader naturally will search out - or be sought out, by algorithms - material he or she agrees with. That consumer takes less time to investigate alternative views and has less patience - something less mentally taxing is just a click away. When you pay, you’re making a commitment, and I think people…

One thing I'd add to this: the algorithm actually selects for stuff you agree with or hate. So sometimes instead of an echo chamber you get a war chamber, which I'm not sure is better.

We think that people should choose what they read. Stepping back and thinking about what you want to subscribe to -- instead of doing one more scroll -- helps.

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

#66

Post by tptacek »

cjbest wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, so he's not a partner or advisor or anything like that? I guess I'm just curious about the level of the endorsement you're getting here. Thanks again for answering these questions!

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

#67

Post by funfunfunction »

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

Brand new account, -4 Karma. This is spam.

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

#68

Post by cjbest »

scott00 wrote: post #65

What's the best way to discover substack content? substack.com doesn't have search or browse functionality as far as I can tell.

We're working on this! Right now most people discover through the author's networks, and from people sharing free content.

We made a super basic discovery feature (that's just chronological free posts) here: https://www.substack.com/discover but we need to make that a lot better now that the home page is starting to get appreciable traffic :)

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

#69

Post by naravara »

cjbest wrote: post #64
MattTaibbi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the exact opposite is true. The problem with the “one click free” universe of tons of free content is that the reader naturally will search out - or be sought out, by algorithms - material he or she agrees with. That consumer takes less time to investigate alternative views and has less patience - something less mentally taxing is just a click away. When you pay, you’re making a commitment, and I think people…

One thing I'd add to this: the algorithm actually selects for stuff you agree with or hate. So sometimes instead of an echo chamber you get a war chamber, which I'm not sure is better. We think that people should choose what they read. Stepping back and thinking about what you want to subscribe to -- instead of doing one more scroll -- helps.

>So sometimes instead of an echo chamber you get a war chamber, which I'm not sure is better.

I think the "war chamber" basically reinforces the echo chamber. You never see the reasonable people within the camps you hate, you only ever see the most ridiculous, most absurd shit the internet has to offer that inhabits that camp.

I noticed this a lot during the whole GamerGate thing. It's like those people had just been seeing endless streams of tweets and Tumblr posts from verbally abusive (or more often, satirical and sarcastic) feminists and strung them together to create a narrative about being "under siege." Never mind that what they were seeing was not at all a representative sample of the group they're talking about, it's their idea of what the group looks like and there's no way to recalibrate them once they dig in.

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