Ben Smith on the rise of Substack and independent journalists [video]
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Ben Smith seems to think something has changed in the market such that people are now willing to make small payments to individual writers. However Smith does not say what has changed.
I’d be curious to know what’s different this time and welcome any insight from the board.
And in general, if you pay for news, you want opinionated voices you can deeply trust, and whose bias you're familiar with. That's not possible on an aggregated news platform, since that by its nature will try to be all things to a fairly large group of people - you need a mass audience to pay for all the writers. Individual writers can afford a smaller audience. (Which also means they can avoid giving away much content to regularly draw an audience)
What that means for large-scale/expensive reporting is an interesting question, because the independent model doesn't work for that almost by definition.
> whose bias your are familiar with I This is fair, but there is a positive version which is "whose worldview you understand, and find interesting/valuable"
Every person and organization comes with some kind of bias - even if part of that bias is "try to be clear eyed and tell the truth".
The advantage of subscribing directly to writers is that you get to choose explicitly who you want to trust, and having done so the writers' incentive is to keep that trust.
As a writer, you get to make your own bet about what work is important, you get paid in proportion to the value you create, and only your readers can fire you.
truth and trust do intertwine deeply in the subconscious, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use our conscious brains to disentangle them when it leads us astray.
we should seek a variety of reasonable perspectives, especially including differing ones to our own. trust the reasonable, even if disagreeable. that's what get us to truth, not a flight to homogeneity.
and that's the lament here--it's getting harder and harder to find reasonable perspectives because every media outlet, even the venerates like nytimes, are leaning hard into partisanship and tribalism.
possibly a more personal interaction with the people who create the content. Same reason twitch or patreon has a lot of appeal. it's a sort of community more than an actual transaction in exchange for content.
Traditional journalists and name-brand writers rarely ever entered into personal relationships with their readers and in many ways it was important to not be swayed by the readership themselves. With the rise of these independent creators it seems more like the opposite. I honestly don't think this is good for publishing necessarily because it's kind of like a mini-cult even.
It's a sort of regression to pre-modern tribalism where only "local" events matter to you -- except "local" means whatever independent content creators you are subscribed to, and their respective tribes. While this was always the case for much of the developing and pre-modern world, this is a new state of affairs for the West. The educated Western public is now regressing to a state of ignorance about global affairs to the extent that they have no idea what "global affairs" even means, all the while believing that they have a "better" worldview due to their "woke" independent analysis. The real problem is the loss of a shared context and common knowledge with which to engage in conversation with people around you.
comfort is entirely orthogonal to journalism anyway. it's purpose is to (mis-)inform, not to entertain and provide bonding fodder. you have plenty of other, better (media) avenues for that (movies, tv, etc).
Substack keeps saying "eventually" on using your own, but with no clear timeline or real justification for not launching with it. Same reason I won't touch Hey.
That said, it’s a fair point, and I understand wanting to wait until we support it.
The same with happen with Substack. They need to grow, just like every other VC-funded startup. An inevitable decline in quality will result.
Granted, I do think Substack is more of a platform than an aggregator compared to Facebook. But people that want to hop on Substack just need to know that you are (as of now) going to be sharing your brand with Substack and also that you will be at the whim of their feature development and what their roadmap looks like. They raised their Series A a year ago but their progress with site features has been... well, underwhelming.
As is Patreon, as well. Their website is slow and a pain to use. They just stopped publishing direct, hard links to S3 in subscription RSS feeds late last year or early this year (I forget which). They don't support generating per-user or per-timeframe affiliate/coupon URLs, despite suggesting that to their users as a paid content option.
Ghost made a big deal in comments on this site awhile back about "how much work" was put into integrating with Patreon in regard to generating password-less links, but really... Patreon generates password-less links already, as do a hundred email marketing apps, not rocket science. It'd take someone about 5 seconds to find a Django tutorial explaining how to generate one-time links on youtube, I would wager.
All of these platforms suffer more from their founders trying to be what they're not to some degree, in my opinion. A marketing platform run by people who aren't experienced in marketing isn't going to do well. Why do we expect that a publishing platform run by a journalist or an artist is going to do well?
I fully expect one day for Substack to end up like Medium, but having spoken to quite a few of the people there on all kinds of matters, they're fighting against it really hard.
When the inevitable does happen, I'll take Tales From The Dork Web elsewhere. Until then, It's the first non self-hosted platform I've used for writing that I'm actually ok with, and I'm pretty functionally paranoid.
I happen to believe that the work is the work, and it's done well or poorly regardless of your membership in an organization or an association. And at least for attorneys, most of the work isn't nearly as difficult as we like to pretend. It's just more lucrative for the profession to be scandalized at the idea that people who aren't trained professionals could do many of the things we do.
Journalism does require standards, but I'd say as long as the standards are adhered to, journalism is happening.
You wouldn't take on a big case of national impact entirely solo and expect, and journalists can't produce a trustworthy product in isolation, not in the long run at least.
And yet it produces so unbelievably large and frequent issues with the accuracy and completeness that this either does not help, is not the goal, or journalists not working for large publishers must get this wrong all the time, all over the place. I don't think that's the case, and I do think that the belief that it somehow helps is specifically why there are so many giant issues with the current media products.
Journalism is about passing on the who-what-when-where-why. Factual information to the public. You see very little of that these days. Too many opinion in basic article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students...
> Amid ‘Trump Effect’ Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants
After reading this article, do you think colleges overall are seeing a significant drop in international applicants, a significant increase, or it stayed about the same?
What actually happened: "39% of responding institutions reported a decline in international applications, 35% reported an increase, and 26% reported no change in applicant numbers."
source: https://www.aacrao.org/docs/default-source/default-document-...
Or this: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/upshot/free-market-for-ed...
After reading this article, what do you think about the general views of economists on school vouchers? Note how they couch this:
> But economists are far less optimistic about what an unfettered market can achieve in education. Only a third of economists on the Chicago panel agreed that students would be better off if they all had access to vouchers to use at any private (or public) school of their choice.
They want you to think that economist are on-net against vouchers. Now read the source: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/education/
36% agree, 37% uncertain, 18% disagree. It's not "only a third", its really that twice as many economists agree with vouchers than disagree, plus a wide amount of uncertainty.
NYT is full of this stuff. It's terrible. They constantly editorialize even factual sources to confirm the views of their anticipated readers.
Broadly speaking if the people with megaphones tell you that people with megaphones are good, and are more important than ever, and intimate that the truth is their domain, consider for a moment that it might not be. Just because someone has a megaphone does not mean they are a light-bearer, no matter what motto they put on their masthead.
There are countless examples of bad journalism from the NYT to Vice all the way to the links of Breitbart.
Look at the Scott Alexander case in recent days or looking further back the scandal around Johann Hari.
I think this would be a good thing and at the very worst not worse than what we have now.
Patreon actually chose the perfect name, because the business model is exactly what the name suggests, medieval patronage. The creator is intimately beholden to the financier.
One of the significant steps forwards in modern media was a separation of finance from content and investigative work, the newsroom having a degree of autonomy from both readers and funding. Independent journalism is the ultimate personalisation of news.
Which actually proves that the New York Times still works perfectly fine. That's not the sort of conflict an independent journalist would even have, because they would never even dare to publish something that would anger their likely homogenous readerbase and thus threaten their paycheck.
It's actually precisely because the NYT still works like a reasonably diverse newspaper that they constantly end up in one shitstorm or the other, not despite of it.
And for what it's worth, I read several people online who I'd be happy to pay and I respect them enough intellectually that when they hold opinions I disagree with, I end up changing my mind as often as not. I may be a weirdo, but I don't think it's unheard for people to seek out online writers precisely because of their independent-mindedness rather than their dogmatic adherence to a party line. In my experience, it seems to be traditional media that has drawn up along party lines.
I admire the NYT as an institution, but I certainly don't think it has anything like a monopoly on journalistic integrity.
That is basically dereliction of duty considering that the piece is from a sitting US senator advocating for military intervention against American citizens. Should he have stayed on in that job?
It shouldn't come as a surprise that that topic would cause more public consternation than doxxing the author of a semi-popular blog that the majority of Americans have no stake in.
Certainly it's debatable whether that piece should have been published, but the stories about failures of professionalism sound like reasons they came up with after they published something that plenty of other major newspapers would have published, and discovered that their readership and employees really didn't like it.
To be clear, I think it's totally fine that the organization runs that way, but I think it's wrong to put them on a pedestal.
the cotton piece was published exactly to generate outrage and partisanship, not to be informative, and it backfired--a lack of editorial integrity, not an issue with the offensive content itself.
Investigative journalism is a small and relatively poorly supported subset of journalism as a whole. It does happen - see for example McCrum's takedown of Wirecard in the FT - but elsewhere in journalism basic fact-checking is considered an irrelevance at best.
All of the most popular newspapers in the UK are regularly sued for libel, and they regularly lose, because - to be blunt - they make shit up to promote a party line, and their only interest in the facts is where they can be used for political leverage.
Some of the former editors and high-level editorial staff literally spent time in jail for phone hacking and other forms of privacy abuse - not because they were interested in disinterestedly championing the truth, but because they wanted salacious gossip about celebrities, minor royals who needed to be kept in place, and politicians whose private lives might embarrass them in a politically useful way.
I know of one case where a journalist from one of those outlets was involved in handing out heroin to street-level contacts for similar information.
And then you only need to consider the woefully poor quality of most scientific and financial reporting to understand how low standards are.
So no - I would rather read and pay for the views of an independent blogger over those of a nominally credentialed paid propagandist and bottom feeder.
Don't confuse the few outlets that are willing to pay for investigative journalism with the profession as a whole.