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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.

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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.

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.

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