It’s time to bolster the bonds between people who actually care about what gets published each day and, of course, the politics and machinations behind the scenes that went into it. While that’s bad for media gossip fiends, it’s also bad for the community of people who work in New York media. Substack is bringing writers closer to their readers Literary newsletters from the likes of Salman Rushdie, George Saunders and Roxane Gay are reviving. There’s now a lot that happens inside New York newsrooms and board rooms that doesn’t get much, if any, reporting beyond a press release and a tweetstorm. If you know something we should know, reach out to us at Subscribe? There is plenty of discussion about the media these days, but most of the outlets that employed full-time media reporters have either cut back or transformed the beat into an outpost in the political culture wars. Click to read The Killjoy Guide, by Meg MacPherson, a Substack publication. Each fellow will also meet with Gay monthly and receive up to 15,000 in services from Substack, such as editorial support and design. Three writers will receive a 25,000 stipend to develop and publish a Substack newsletter. And that leaves media companies with two choices: find ways to compete with Substack or rethink what it is that they offer that Substack can’t or won’t.The Fine Print is an email newsletter reporting on the New York City media community, published by Gabriel Snyder and reported by Andrew Fedorov. Roxane Gay has partnered with Substack to launch the Joel Gay Creative Fellowships, named in honor of her late brother. The threat it poses to news, then, is best understood as an economic one. By definition, the people thriving on Substack are the very sort whose work gets readers to pull out their credit cards and subscribe. It’s those personalities that Substack is going after and poaching. The Times’ digital success has been built partly on a major expansion of its opinion section magazines such as the Atlantic and Mother Jones have relied on their best-known columnists to support their originally reported features and investigations. As a result, they became pivotal to the media’s online subscription strategy, which is one of the few strategies that’s still working-for now. It’s also one that became more important as the internet collapsed newspapers’ geographic monopolies and put them in competition with magazines and blogs.
To sell papers, to drive ratings, to attract splashy advertisers, they needed other stuff too: sports scores, sensational crime stories, weepy human-interest features, spicy op-eds, stock quotes, crosswords, weather reports, classified ads.īut there remained one big draw that was, until recently, still bundled: the personalities.
But newsrooms also understood that dry accountings of the quotidian affairs of the statehouse or lengthy series on workplace safety violations at a local employer weren’t enough on their own to draw in a mass audience. Click to read Feelings, Healing, by Meghan Watson, a Substack publication with hundreds of readers. enjoyed working with debut and emerging writers as well as more established writers, like New York Times bestselling authors Rumaan Alam and Roxane Gay. A place for those who wish to see themselves in words. It’s that work that justified their privileged status in the Bill of Rights, their access to the halls of government, their righteous self-image as guardians of democracy. Thoughts and reflections for those on their healing journey. Historically, news organizations employed teams of workaday reporters to suss out what’s going on in some domain of public interest and present that to a wide audience. To understand how it could alter the economics of, say, the Washington Post or the Minneapolis Star Tribune, you have to understand the cross-subsidies at the heart of the newspaper business.
Yet just because Substack seems unlikely to produce a lot of news doesn’t mean that traditional news organizations are safe.