Anne Helen Petersen

VOICES OF THE PANDEMIC

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 “nonremunerative” 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 VCskeptical 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

to become the fifth-most-read among paid subscriptions—he claimed that his income had risen from less than $200,000 at New York magazine to $500,000. When I asked the founders if they thought his presence might discourage other writers from joining, they gave me a pat reply. “We’re not a media company,” Best said. “If somebody joins the company and expects us to have an editorial position and be rigorously enforcing some ideological line, this is probably not the company they wanted to join in the first place.”

In a broken industry, even a little agency can start to feel like control. But that won’t necessarily translate into the large-scale transformation that Substack’s founders pitch. If “be your own boss” is a nice slogan in the abstract, it ignores the fact that power dynamics always exist, even where they’re not formalized. As time went on, Peck came up against the limits of what she could do alone. “It’s great I don’t have to go to anybody for approving stories or things I want to cover,” she said. “But I think it’s always beneficial having other professional journalists to work with and bounce ideas off of and get feedback from.” In August, to help with global coverage, she brought on a contributing editor; for any original reporting he does, she pays out of pocket. She wants to keep the newsletter free, though to keep herself going, she’s considering adding an option for subscribers to pay.

Ideally, however, her future wouldn’t involve Substack at all, Peck told me; if Coronavirus News for Black Folks were picked up by a major outlet, say, she’d have the staff and resources to build it out properly. That’s an unlikely scenario, she knows—for the same reasons that she was driven out of the mainstream media industry to begin with. “I got into journalism because I wanted to write stories about and for the Black community,” she said. “There’s not a lot of places where you can do that and get paid a decent amount and have benefits. It varies, but I don’t think a lot of Black journalists have a ton of options outside of creating their own things for themselves.” What she has now is a harbor. “Substack has some of the materials for free to help us to build our own thing,” she continued. “We need so much more, but we’re going to work with what we have.”

As more journalists embark on independent careers, the need for support infrastructure, beyond Substack, will become increasingly urgent. Labor organizing, the traditional method for making an industry more equitable, will have to adapt to the new conditions, especially as more and more industries embrace the independent-contractor model. Accountability is harder when the company you work for refuses to acknowledge what field it’s operating in. Yet people like Peck are still workers, even if they lack a boss.

In September, Discourse Blog, a newsletter on the politics and culture of the left run by a group of journalists who used to work at a now-discontinued site called Splinter (I used to write for it, too), decided they would leave Substack for a competitor called Lede. It was the third time in six months that Discourse, which launched on WordPress, had changed platforms—perhaps an indication of some of the difficulties of creating ambitious projects independently, even as a team. When they made the announcement, the writers at Discourse said that, at Substack, they were limited in their ability to grow. One of the co-owners noted that it was hard to attract readers through internet search alone; they wanted to track audience data. In essence, they sought, as much as possible, to steer their own destiny.

The guys at Substack aren’t sweating the loss, at least for now. Ultimately, they will be judged not by their creative output, but by how much money they can return for those who have invested in their company. The platform is new, but the metrics are not; financial concerns trump all others. When I asked Best and McKenzie about their plans post-pandemic (should that time ever come), they told me that they don’t foresee any changes to their fundamentals. “We did not build Substack to be successful only during disaster times,” McKenzie said. In a recent column, Ben Smith, of the Times, reported that Twitter has discussed acquiring Substack, though McKenzie quickly tweeted, “This is not going to happen.”

They’re still scouting writers. “Do you have a Substack?” Best asked me, at one point. “Always be closing, Chris,” McKenzie said, with a grin. I smiled and gave a noncommittal answer. As a freelancer, it seemed more likely than not that one day I would start a Substack, or something similar. What choice did I have? cjr