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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

> Yet most journos post the actually meat of the article to a Twitter thread anyway. Why try so hard and give me so many reasons to avoid your actual platform you control?

Journalists don't typically control the actual platform they publish to. The news agency does, and the news agency is the one trying to figure out how to extract the maximum amount of revenue out of a dwindling number of readers.

I'd much rather hear from the journalists directly, and I'd love to see platforms treat those journalists as the ones running the show. "Patreon for good journalism" is a far more compelling value proposition than any newspaper. Could someone hurry up and kill the newspapers and provide a platform for all their good journalists, please?

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The gig economy will not produce good journalism, as good reporters prefer a stable job as much as anyone else. I like a few writers at the NYT, so I pay $5/month to support them. Same with a few other newspapers. The bonus is I also get an absolute mountain of other stuff that I occasionally read and really enjoy (like the cooking column). I don’t see how giving a handful of individuals $5-$10 per month each, Patreon-style, is a good value. And they definitely won’t have as good of a health insurance plan.

Not to mention that journalism isn’t really a solo gig. The processes, standards, and traditions of an institution are just as much of a factor as good reporters in producing good journalism.

> I don’t see how giving a handful of individuals $5-$10 per month each, Patreon-style, is a good value

It's not, this is why microtransactions are so important for us to make colloquial.

But the "news agency" also provides value. If you have a bunch of journalists working together (i.e., "a newspaper"), then those journalists are freer to take long term risks (e.g. work on big investigative stories). At better newspapers journalists don't need to churn out junk every day; they don't have to worry about doing all of their own marketing, sales and editing; they get to use their colleagues and their colleagues' networks/resources/sources to improve their stories and their reporting. I think substack ("patreon for good journalism") has a good model, but we shouldn't ignore that it has both advantages and disadvantages compared to most news orgs.

In some ways, "Patreon for good journalism" is Substack's pitch. It has its good and bad aspects but no doubt it's a very different monetization model than the ad-driven model.

It's an improvement, but it assumes you already know who the best journalists to follow and support are, and you just need a way to support and hear from them. Curation is a useful service in itself; curation just shouldn't mean you get to extract the vast majority of the value.

Kinda. It still tend to encourage frequent posting, which weighs against long form investigative journalism - monthly or yearly subscriptions don't work well when you might work on a piece for over a year.

That, combined with risk, means some of the most interesting stories out there still need patrons with long attention spans.

Those patrons are often more successful Substack journalists, these days, who double as the outlet in which they publish.

I think Substack achieves the goal of Patreon for journalism and has demonstrated market demand for high quality independent writing.

They even run a program that started several months ago where they offloaded risk from promising writers for a year by guaranteeing them a minimum pay in exchange for a larger cut of realized platform for the same year. AIUI several writers like Matt Yglesias et al have done well via this program and built audiences that will give them significant windfalls when their risk-mitigation contracts with Substack expire.

I think the agency of the future is just some sort of partnership between several writers on the platform or other similar platforms that allows you to purchase a group subscription to several writers at a small discount. I imagine that writers who are able to sustain such high levels of revenue may also be able to hire editors etc as necessary along with taking on intern writers to write [approved!] guest posts on their streams.

Substack isn’t for journalism. It’s for opinion articles. I think it’s an awesome platform and I’m glad it exists. But it’s not journalism imho.

I'm not too familiar with Substack aside from reading a couple "columns" (can't think of a better noun) from there but is there any reason why it wouldn't be a useful platform for journalism, aside from it being so associated with opinion pieces?

> I'm not too familiar with Substack aside from reading a couple "columns" (can't think of a better noun) from there but is there any reason why it wouldn't be a useful platform for journalism, aside from it being so associated with opinion pieces?

Compared to opinionating, actual journalism is more expensive, is more specialized, takes more time, and often elicits less of the strong emotional reactions that drive "engagement."

what does any of that have to do with whether or not finished journalism goes onto the web via Substack?

> what does any of that have to do with whether or not finished journalism goes onto the web via Substack?

Because who's going to pay a monthly subscription to an individual for an unwritten scoop that will take months to investigate and may not pan out?

All an opinionator needs is a keyboard and some input to have an opinion on, so they can pump out that kind of entertainment day after day.

> provide a platform for all their good journalists

What will all the recent journalism school grads do before they become skilled?

Collect information for skilled journalists and work with them. Isn't that kind of how news agencies always operated? In the "Patreon for Journalism" model you just change the number of "agencies" from a dozen per country to a dozen per city. With all the up- and downsides that come with that.

Good point. I'll bet CGP Grey's employees start their own youtube channels someday.

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