30
CJR
VO IC ES OF THE PA ND EMI C
What We’ve Learned It doesn’t matter how many New York Times stories you read about the virus spreading into rural areas; you need a local news source reporting on someone that you know, or your kids know.
How can you transfer some of the good stuff that happens on Facebook back into a paper? —Anne Helen Petersen
Former culture writer at BuzzFeed and author of Culture Study, a Substack
monetizing an existing form of media—newsletters—that had long been used, especially by women, to foster communities that were “non- remunerative” and “artistically strange.”) Substack’s founders are open about the fact that media and VC money typically don’t mix well; McKenzie told me that journalists who are VC- skeptical feel “burned for good reasons.” But he said there was a difference between companies like BuzzFeed and Vox Media taking hundreds of millions in venture capital “on a big unproven bet that that can scale to a massive return” and Substack, which he calls “a platform that has a stable, transparent, and simple business model that is proven to work.” When I asked if Substack’s investors were looking for large returns, Best replied, “We have expectations for growth for ourselves that are at least as high as our investors’.” Even if you accept that premise, there remains a broader question—one that the industry at large will have to answer—as to whether venture capitalism, driven by the pursuit of high returns on big-bet investments, is, at its core, antithetical to the project of journalism. (The reasons Peck made her newsletter free run at odds with the goals of investors.) I asked Substack’s founders about the sentiment, popular among the venture capitalist class, that reporters are too powerful and need to be curbed. “Our business is a little bound up with Andreessen Horowitz, and our business is a lot bound up with writers,” McKenzie said. “We don’t look to control or influence the thought of either of those groups. We don’t own the attitudes of every Substack writer, and we don’t own the attitudes of our investors.” It was a nonideological, noneditorial stance—one that he’d taken in conversation with me before. But often, adherence to neutrality only enforces existing power structures. In these moments, Substack’s founders veer into unsettling corporate-tech-dudespeak, papering over the fact that a “nonideological” vision is, of course, ideology just the same. When Sullivan joined Substack, over the summer, he put the company’s positioning to the test: infamous for publishing excerpts from The Bell Curve, a book that promotes bigoted race “science,” Sullivan would now produce the Weekly Dish, a political newsletter. (Substack’s content guidelines draw a line at hate speech.) Sullivan’s Substack quickly rose
