Here’s my problem with Substack
The other day I noticed my photograph on the Chicago Tribune website, andmy reactionwas, “Who is that whippersnapper?”
That I use the word “whippersnapper” when talking tomyself is not the only evidence of aging since the photo was taken. The photo itself, taken in 2011 not long before I started writing this column, feels like it came fromanother life entirely. My hair then was starting to gray; it’s finishing the job now. I cannot see without my glasses, which were not necessary then. I still own the shirt because I do not like to buy new clothes and it’s a nice shirt.
Seeing that picture brought me up short as I thought about all the columns I’ve written here and the long legacy of other writers who have been published by the Chicago Tribune over the years. I thought of the underlying support of editors, designers, delivery people and others who have made it possible for all those columns to accrue.
It shook me because I’m worried about what’s happening with Substack.
Substack, for the uninitiated, is a platform for newsletters to which individuals subscribe, and which then arrive via email. They also live on theweb at the Substack platform. Initially, Substack was used primarily for writers with other affiliations to send out information or auxiliary content to fans and followers, but Substack has recently been making an aggressive move into becoming something like a media company by recruiting prominent writers and journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Anand Giridharadas, and Anne Helen Petersen (whose “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” I recently covered).
These prominent writers work under a subscription model. The writing that they used to do for traditional media outlets is now behind a Substack wall, subscribed to by individuals. Many writers will do some mix of free and paid content, but to access everything by a given writer typically requires ponying up somewhere around $5 to $10 amonth.
For individual writers, it’s can be a monetary windfall. Do the math. A thousand subscribers at $5 a month starts to get into real money. Not to get into specifics, but I would need an extremely small fraction of my weekly readership here to follow me to Substack to make significantly more dough. Believe me, I think about it.
But I don’t want to do it, because long term, I do not think that our culture is served by walling off writers— no matter how great they are— behind individual subscriptions. There is something important about writers being aggregated together. Maybe someone who reads me discovers someone new to them, or vice versa.
Also, I don’t only want to be read by my fans who are willing to pay a few bucks a month. What’s the fun in that?
How do we discover new writers if we’re all working our individual gardens? Substack identifies promising writers by their degree of Twitter engagement. Is this howwe will now identify young talent? Howd oes your writing change if you have to constantly worry about not alienating your subscribers? What happens to your writing if you write in a vacuum, without editors prodding you to question and clarify your ownwork?
Fortunately, I don’t have a tough decision like those much more prominent writers. Sure, I could probably make more money, but it wouldn’t be life-changing dough. Still, Iwonder if I’m a fool for still believing that we’re better served when we’re banded together and choosing to forgo a little bit of extra fortune for those beliefs. I don’t want to wake up one day realizing that Iwas the sucker all along.