Nevertheless, it’s reasonable to worry about yet another traditional source of revenue for (perennially unprofitable) accountability journalism becoming uncoupled from such reporting. And there’s presumably a hard limit on how many different paid newsletters the reading public is willing to support. The New York Times isn’t struggling to hire big-name columnists, of course. An ecosystem in which star pundits serve as a major profit center for newspapers, which can then use the revenue generated by their pontificating to cross-subsidize hard reporting, is probably healthier for the Fourth Estate than one in which star pundits reap windfall returns by going it alone. And yet the latter’s work is generally more indispensable to journalism’s civic function. It’s easier for social-media-addicted daily commentators to cultivate loyal fandoms than it is for investigative journalists or state-level political reporters. This is a concerning development in some respects. Unless he’s paying $50,000 a month for his internet connection, his newsletter’s rate of profit dwarfs that of most any major media outlet. Former Vox columnist Matt Yglesias, for example, is reportedly poised to rake in $860,000 in subscription revenue this year. Combine this reality with the exceptionally low overhead costs of running an email newsletter, and you get a formula for achieving the impossible: a hyperprofitable digital-journalism enterprise. There are apparently a great many journalism consumers who aren’t willing to pay $5 a month to support the work of dozens of journalists at a single publication but are eager to pay $8 a month to patronize a single blogger. In most cases, this proved to be an astoundingly good business decision. If you aren’t sufficiently broken inside to be an extremely-online journalist - or, worse, a non-journalist who diligently monitors the beefs within the professional posting community - then you probably missed (the latest round of) media Twitter’s brouhaha over Substack.Ī tool for publishing newsletters, Substack grew in prominence over the past year as several well-known opinion journalists abandoned their longtime employers to start their own subscription-based, bespoke punditry shops on the platform. Photo: Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection via The “newspaper” was a bit like what we modern humans know as a Substack, only printed out.
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