How will it differ to Substack?
We're building a network of local journalists, along with others in national verticals. The incentive structure exists in a way to promote news people want to come back to read, not clickbait headlines, divisive or anger driving hot takes, or lowest common denominator coverage. All geared to 18-34 year olds, who are less likely to consume local news in the traditional forms, like subscribing to a local paper or watching broadcast TV.
This is one of the reasons we're really focusing on local first -- unless you're in a handful of American cities that still has a thriving local press corps, the question isn't really who is first, it's who is covering it at all.
Beyond that, we're trying to move away from the traditional formats that somehow migrated from the print and broadcast worlds online. When you write an article, you have to have all of the information together at once; of course, that's rarely how the reporting process works. By posting it as reporters get information, and as they're comfortable reporting that information -- it not only can get to the consumer quickly, but we hope it can also eliminate some of the mystery behind why a journalist is reporting what they are reporting.
As you get to smaller cities and even towns, I'd argue that weekly is probably fine for frequency and allows for coverage of what is actually important. Of course, online extras could cover more urgent things.
The overall economics are still an issue of course, but do people really need most local news RIGHT NOW? Of course, there was a point in my life when most of the news I consumed came from reading Time Magazine every week.
But then of course, theres the other stuff. Stuff that you might want to know about over the course of the week. The great part of the Internet now is that there doesn't really have to be any delineation between the two; we don't have to go to press. We can post what we need to when we need to, and of course push notifications/etc for the really urgent stuff.
Still -- a few fine points on this:
- He's covering topics of national interest, which is very different than local when it comes to subscription numbers.
- To that point, "Twitter continues to be the biggest driver of newsletter signups." We've seen that it can be incredibly difficult for local news to trend on social media, namely because -- by definition -- it appeals to a limited audience.
- By being investigative only, it means he can choose what he is willing to cover. Investigative reporting is incredibly important, but it can be very different than replacing local newspapers -- while they can do investigative pieces as well, so much of what they do is covering the events around their coverage area. That takes a team of people, because you cannot be everywhere at once.
- He has a big name. True, he might not have been famous when he started, but the article itself points out that he was able to gain coverage in Wired because what he was doing was such a novelty. Now, the headline of the Substack you linked to doesn't even need to include the name of his newsletter, his own name is so well known.