From time to time, something shiny is flouted as the future of media/journalism/news. It’s irritating and, to people operating in those sectors, it’s quite honestly frustrating. Currently the fanfare has actually gone in the direction of Substack and its e-newsletter solution– and I will attempt to discuss right here why it absolutely isn’t the future of journalism.
A pre-emptive alert: I love newsletters, I subscribe to several and I take a lot of value from the ones I absorb. Some of them aren’t also from information media and have amazing value, like Morozov’s The Curriculum. And I take into consideration newsletters a remarkable means to connect to a reader base and involve their demands. I could also consider taking on Substack myself, if I wanted to serve a certain team of viewers. What I emulate is all the hype about “the future of news” or the “redemption of media”– in its essence, Substack is blogging by paid email. No shiny surprise will come from that, also if it’s improved an excellent system.
My initial argument relates to the step of success in the system and how it diverges from top quality journalism. Quality journalism depends upon experience. That knowledge is hard to obtain, is expensive and it is absolutely not constrained to the tiny group of once-famous-anglosaxon-journalists-that defected-from-mainstream-media. An expertise improved severe reporting does not automatically convert right into punditry neither public fame, so the Substack system does not work for all the great people out there. It works for those who have a fanbase, sure. Yet that is not an action for top quality and Substack does not address that issue for the viewers.
My 2nd argument dives into numbers. The reality that some on top make a really healthy revenue just means that the absolute bulk of makers make no profit whatsoever. Likewise, as you are paying individual producers, the math does not accumulate. Spending for two or three newsletters is a lot much more costly than subscribing a high quality paper or a magazine, with a whole lot less high quality and quantity of info offered. Or is a person really arguing that a couple of concentrated newsletters are equal to the NYT, the Feet or The Atlantic, simply to estimate a few international quality titles? It simply is a poor bargain.
Lastly, my third disagreement goes into the major issue I discover in all these platforms: the absence of dedication to the visitor. There is no curation whatsoever, there is no guts in picking one writer over another, no determination in mentioning “this is more vital” or “this is not acceptable”. There is no threshold, the quality is simply established by appeal. You can not offer a reader community similar to this. This plays against the quality of the general plan, but also against the capacity for a customer to discover something he actually wishes to learn more about. In a way, Substack reinforces the issue we face with podcasts: no great referral engine and no quality curation from the platforms hosting them.
Guess what. Choosing is at the heart of journalism. You have to select what is or isn’t news, which is the concern, which resources to dedicate, how to cover it and how to present it. If you renounce from choosing, you do have a platform– but you do not have journalism. Substack, like Tool, is not the future of journalism. Neither is WordPress or Ghost. The future of journalism is top quality reporting: something that occurs at the hands of specialised reporters, effectively aided by editors and supervisors, offering their neighborhood of viewers.