in light of recent developments at my workplace and a recent argument with some guy online, i’ve been thinking a little bit about the idea that substack (or some platform like it) could serve as a replacement for “legacy” media (or really any publication with certain institutional safeguards in place, e.g., editors, fact-checkers, and enough resources to support serious reporting).
I think you're right about a lot of this but I am not sure about criticism tbh—I see writing on here that is not amateurish or polemical (in some political sense) that I also think would not get published by an institutional publication because it's insufficiently "hook-y."
So I dunno—I do think a lot of the good conversation about books is concentrated here right now, even if that represents a tiny number of substacks in general. If I had to choose between only reading the substacks I like vs the NYT Book Review, it would be an extremely easy choice to make. I agree with you in general but I think you might be rating "legacy media" a little too highly.
I’m also unsure. There is more good criticism on here than reporting (I don’t think I’ve ever seen good reporting on here?), and I might pick the criticism here over the criticism in *some* legacy publications, but I don’t think i would take a random piece on here over one in a good literary magazine basically ever
I ran this thought experiment with better publications - the NYT Book Review sucks and is not really criticism, thus barely the same genre as good Substack critics - and limits on the amount of Substack. Would I pick the NYRB over 5 good Substacks? 10? 20? Or the LRB over the entirety of Substack? I would be really sad to lose the LRB, but I think it would be hard to choose any single legacy publication over the whole of Substack, because I am not interested in everything in the LRB and Substack has such wide genre and style (and ofc also quality) variety. But would I choose Substack over 2-3 legacy publications? I'm not sure.
I think this starts to get into personal vibe/taste...I really like to read a LOT about things I am intensely interested in at the moment, not the curated selection fed to me in an issue of a magazine. I just constitutionally love the internet and its volume and messiness; I absolutely cannot relate to Becca's dread of a million emails. I can never get enough emails, even if I don't read them. Give me all the notifications, everywhere all the time. (I know this is insane, and I do consciously struggle against it - sometimes.) Just one or two magazines would maybe feel inert, quiet, and sad to me. I hate reading things by myself and not having anyone to talk to about them! Maybe this means Substack is bad because I'm using the internet to avoid meeting real people to talk to things about, or maybe it's fine because I am using it to meet them right now. But that's why it seems like I would have to get a LOT of legacy publications - ARCHIVES INCLUDED - to take them over Substack in the deal.
for me the answer is clear. i'd pick LRB. but for me substack is a different thing. substack is a slightly elevated version of being on instagram or whatever most of the time, so it's not really competing with the lrb for me (it would lose)
I don't think it really competes for me, either! I want both. But it's definitely more than "an elevated version of Instagram," and it's no wonder that kind of statement annoys Substack people (not including me). My instagram is a bunch of men posting shirtless photos of themselves and dumb politics stories from the exact same account; my Substack is full of really smart people writing about what they read.
yeah, I mean, I partly picked the NYT bc even though it mostly sucks right now, all of us (except Becca, for technical reasons) would of course review a book for them if asked. Even if the resulting piece was actually _less good_ than what we would write on Substack after being compressed and edited into the NYT house style, we'd all do it—I mean I'd certainly do it [call me NYT book desk]—and we'd do it because it's The New York Times™️ which is somehow both a constant punching bag and a coveted honor.
I don't think I'd take the whole of Substack over the TLS (to which I cannot actually afford to subscribe to lol) but a big part of that is that the TLS actually covers a really wide range of books, whereas if I was stuck with All Of Substack vs Harper's (a magazine I really like / admire / want to write for one day) the books discussed would be so much narrower. Similarly, Bookforum is great—it's a relief that they're back and I happily subscribe—but it feels kind of easy for me to guess who will be in the issue and what they're going to cover etc.
(And again I'm just talking about criticism.… Reporting is a different animal. Even if I think legacy media isn't really covering itself with glory there, it's still a different thing.)
I don't know if this quite fits into our convo here or is a side point, but I think it's a point for Becca's "institutionalism." If I had to pick between having all the legacy publications and their archives vs. Substack THAT would be an exceedingly easy choice. Because even though I currently read a high volume of Substack, one thing it does is sort legacy reading for me. Even though I'm not sitting down with print copies of those mags, I am very very often clicking on links from a Substack or googling "lrb thomas mann" or "nyt book review [author i belatedly discovered]". The institution is an organizer/preserver of writing over time and a mark of quality that Substack as a whole does not, and maybe can never, have. If I google "LRB proust" I know I will surely find great reviews of biographies, translations, possibly by top scholars in the relevant field; if I google "Substack Proust," there's no telling.
And yes, Ion the reporting point Becca is even more right. I keep seeing Substack people say the extremely naive things I said about blogging in the 2000s and people said about Twitter in the 2010s, that clearly do not understand/value what reporting is and how fucking expensive the good kind is. Most Substack people are (rightly) talking about critical/cultural debates, but there are definitely some people who talk about it replacing the media as a whole.
yes in All Of Substack vs All Of Print Media + Archives, print media wins… that one is easy. (adjusting the terms here only because, for professional reasons, i want to be able to look at zines…)
also (in terms of idiosyncrasies of taste) I think part of what I like about Substack is that there's a wider range of tones—to use one of Becca's examples, I like The Drift a lot (and have written for them), but it also feels like it was born already conceiving of itself as an established institution. I know I said this… somewhere… but everybody wants to be the Partisan Review in the little magazine space and this produces a kind of narrow understanding of what seriousness is, how one treats a topic seriously etc.
there is still a place in those magazines for people who are a bit offbeat / did not go to graduate school / whatever (like me!) but it's a noticeable thing.
to your point about reporting - I find it insane how many otherwise-smart people I encounter who just don't seem to know what reporting is. like literally, they do not comprehend what goes into it and what it does and doesn't encompass (unproved attributions of intention, e.g.!). I'm not a writer, but the only reason I don't have crippling student loans is my mother's longtime position at a frequent-punching-bag national newspaper, and you would not believe the number of times I've explained to (again: smart!) people in their 20s/30s that she has literally never met most of her "colleagues" from the opinion pages. I do suspect the way articles get shared on social media has done a lot to mentally collapse that distinction - a months-long reported investigation, a movie review, david brooks saying whatever pops into his head: they're all just twitter links! - which in turn makes it seem like substack is a plausible way forward when it is very much not. bad! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Very bad!!!! Yes I’ve been shocked in reading some of the most uninformed responses to the Bezos development to see how many people have no understanding of the difference
Part of the problem is that too much 'reporting' from mainstream media the past five years reads more and more like op-eds. Especially when it comes to anything touching the culture wars. Ergo, unsurprisingly the two become blurred in the public eye.
at risk of sounding annoying, while i do agree with the vast majority of your points, i think the terminology here is really important - really, we're not talking about "substack" vs. "legacy" models so much as "influencer" vs. "institution" models.
like, for example - i'm sure to you (correct me if i'm wrong), you are primarily a book critic at the washington post. i am *aware* that you're a book critic at the washington post, but that's not how i encountered you - lyta gold (i think?), whose substack i also follow, had you in her list of "other substack recommendations" or whatever it's called on here, and that's how i stumbled upon you, and (i'm not proud to admit this) i have spent much more time reading the posts here than i have your clearly superior and institutionally-edited posts over at WP.
i bring that up as an example because at least when i see folks advocating the "influencer" (substack) model, they're usually making an argument about reach more than anything. speaking as a left-of-center zoomer, though i intellectually understand that there are actual human beings putting in real elbow grease to produce valuable reporting at legacy publications, in the main, i have basically only ever seen legacy media institutions (and Legacy Institutions™️ in general) completely shit the bed, every single day, several times a day, at such a scale that the stink it produces spreads even to the work of writers and reporters working there whose output i otherwise quite like. as a result, i don't really go to legacy institutions to find writers i like anymore - i just go to the individual writers who i already follow and trust and see which writers they recommend.
i don't really like that state of affairs, and in theory i'd prefer a less personalist and more institutional way of doing things. the problem is, of course, that alternative institutions need to be built - and they *are* being built in certain corners. i am currently working on a piece about the wave of independent media orgs that sprouted up over the last few years (404, Hellgate, Rascal, Aftermath, etc.) and a lot of them are doing quite well! with that said, the ones that seem to excel the most are those that are targeting a specific niche, either topical or geographical, and i think it's very possible that the legacy media model - the sort of publication that can simultaneously house boots-on-the-ground reporting on every important social issue and also cooking recipes, Wordle, op-eds, media criticism, and pay the people doing these things a living wage while remaining profitable - is just flat-out not possible in the long-term sans oligarchs (or other financial arrangements that produce similar ethical liabilities).
i don't know enough about the internal economics to say that definitively, but i think the fact that it hasn't already been done in spite of the growing (and, from where i can see, already quite large) demand for it suggests that it might not be.
I think you’re right that this is a better terminological distinction! Because I don’t think a lot of small literary magazines have “shit the bed” in the same way…but I do think they’re much better than substack (and I think that’s where a lot of my own best work has appeared, over the years)
I'm inclined to agree that the "conglomerate" model may not last much longer. Most legacy magazines culled their coverage of opera, non-pop music, dance, and visual art some decades ago, and now they are doing so with poetry and literature more generally. We will likely see a growing niche-ification (sorry!) of cultural journalism--a Pitchfork for poetry, a Letterbox for fiction, etc.
That said, I can't think of a single major 20th c. critic who was not part of an institution, whether academic or publication based. Menken, Wilson, Sontag, Greenberg, Kael, Bangs, Sarris, Trilling, Baldwin, etc. were all affiliated with specific magazines. Partisan Review had a "house style" as much as the _New Yorker_., and even great critics managed to work within those stylistic confines.
So I'm skeptical that literary/cultural criticism will work like "influencer" culture. Lots of people have sold shoes, lotions, sweatpants, etc. without an institutional affiliation. Very few critics have impacted popular or elite taste without a defined institutional perch. Would James Wood's taste matter if he only wrote for Substack? Would Richard Brody's? Jerry Saltz? Ta Nehisi-Coates? Mark Greif's? Jon Baskin's? Becca Rothfield's?
I doubt it. The sociologist in me thinks that institutions--even web-only institutions--still matter a great deal in disseminating cultivated opinion, precisely, because cultural value is so subjective and disputable, and people want to entrust their opinions (perhaps unfortunately) to a certified, badge-wearing gatekeeper. I'm actually okay with a modest amount of gatekeeping, as its what allows informed conversation to happen between moderately learned parties (rather than randos on GoodReads).
this is why I hope that substack starts letting writers aggregate together. you could kind of reverse engineer a print publication by being able to pay one subscription that gives you access to, for instance, a cultural critic, a film writer, short fiction, political coverage, etc. I think that would mirror the chatter that already happens on here between writers. that product would look less like a blog and more like a symposium or something
but i wonder then what the advantage of this is, over a magazine? i agree that it would be better, but it kind of strikes me as re-inventing the wheel (the wheel being the magazine)
I think the benefit derives from the fact that the internet/social media already pushes people toward 'following' individuals rather than the more conventional option of subscribing to publications. I think that the push toward parasociality means that there is a greater appetite for a publication that centers the writers themselves over the larger and more abstract identity of the magazine. Aggregating substacks would be a way to channel these micro cults of personality toward something more communal and less atomized. Sure, you lose something in terms of institutional structure/editorial scaffolding, but it seems like a more organic way to bring reading fanbases together. It has the added benefit of introducing readers to other writers that they might like. the substack 'recommend' feature already does this to a certain extent. there is also just the simple problem that writers are always in conversation with each other, and it feels like a bad fit to begin with if you have to subscribe to each one individually to get the whole dialogue.
It's not that a magazine couldn't do this, it's more that magazines aren't currently doing this (at least, not with the people I'm interested in reading) and this seems to me like the path of least resistance.
All good points. My uncle was a reporter at the Washington Post in the Watergate era. If he were still alive, I’d be forwarding him your thoughts! Apropos of the variety of content in “legacy media,” I am reminded that back when the New Yorker published Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” the magazine didn’t clearly separate reporting from fiction. The public outrage that ensued can be at least partly explained by some readers’ confusion over what was real. All of which is to say, even the media dinosaurs can grow and change. Unfortunately too many of them seem to be changing out of institutional cowardice, but that might be me channeling my grumpy uncle. Anyway, thank you for your work!
Great piece -- the only place where I hear arguments about Substack being a viable alternative to 'legacy' media are from people on Substack. When I (reluctantly) bring up Substack in real life, the reactions range from 'oh that's nice that you have a lil blog :)' to 'what is a substack?', which I think are the right reactions at this point. It's frankly embarrassing to admit to people that I have a newsletter on here lol. I've had a few times where people ask about my writing and I mention Substack, then they nod politely and follow up with 'but what are you actually writing?' That's still the perspective of most readers: real writing is in magazines, newspapers, books, zines, etc, and substack is a silly online thing. Maybe we should listen to those readers.
But yeah I'm also increasingly with you on the 'there are too many substacks'. I open up my inbox and there's like 30 new emails and it's unsustainable. Reading newsletters has kind of messed up my reading life -- been reading a lot less physical magazines, and even books, and I've been writing worse things without the assistance of editors. This platform is being sold as a sweet deal for writers, but I think in the long run it will be bad for the vast majority of writers. I guess the solution (for me) is to write less on here but the instant gratification is so enticing... why labor on longer and more challenging projects that might never see the light of day when I can post something quickly here and get my instant dopamine hit. Ugh!
Yeah, for me browsing substack has basically brcomr what browsing Twitter used to be. I try not to think of most of my time on here as actual reading time, which sort of helps me keep it limited, but like all social media it’s kind of addictive…
I recommend adding all your favorite substacks to an RSS reader. Works for both paid and free, and you can stop receiving the emails and have them all together in a more landing-page type thing
Agreed. 100%. In trying to think of a time when the media wasn’t owned by the wealthy. Some, sure, are owned by many. Some are owned by “the state.” But journalism is expensive. That’s why the media loves advertising! But then they loved it too much, and their readers became datapoints, and the editors forgot about the audience. And then the internet freaked everyone out and instead of getting printy-er, print tried to become more like the internet, which was a lost battle from the start. But what do I know? I host a podcast. About magazines! Which has made me slightly optimistic about the future of print as indies explore new business models. Though I’m not necessarily optimistic about the future of journalism. That’s a whole other podcast. Probably.
Thank you for clarifying this topic. I think you are uniquely positioned to talk pros and cons bc few Substackers also work on legacy media. I wish more writers would talk about the habits of mind that good editing produces. When you read a typical NY’er piece by Menand, Gopnik, Mead, etc you can feel the hand of intensive editing. Same is true of n+1, etc. not all their pieces are great, but their best work exceeds 99% of Substack. And editing does play a huge role in that. It’s like trying to make a funny movie by yourself va working with a team of writers ….
yeah, and editing is not always good! sometimes stuff is flattened to conform to house style. but the best writing of all, i think, is produced by collaborations between the best editors and the best writers
On the question of how newspapers and magazines *could* be structured: perhaps the recent wave of worker-owned / cooperative publications such as Defector or Hell Gate points to another path forward? I’ve been heartened by their success so far, as the model seems to capture many of the strengths of “legacy media” that you lay out while avoiding the dangers of oligarchic control. In any case, thanks for another great blog!
First off, thanks for specifying that you think my writing is great. I appreciate it. I actually don't have much else to say other than that I'm largely in agreement with you. I like Substack but I also like the lit and culture mags, and the mags still have the best pieces.
I suspect that you and I are kilometres apart politically, but I agree with you. Legacy newspapers are news outlets, like substack opinion pieces could never be. Yes, we can get some news from opinion pieces, but that always depends upon someone else having done some reporting first.
The thing I like the British press, which I find far better written and more interesting than its American counterpart, is that they have so many newspapers, all written from a different perspective. If you want the conservative view, you can read the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Express the Sun or the Times. If you lean to the left, then there's the Grauniad or the Independent.
Number 1 is very true, but there have been developments on this from. Drop Site has managed to figure out a way to fund reporting, as has The Pillar. (Just using these as examples, not endorsing their content.) So there is a way.
I see Substack more as a tool, one among many. I don't see how the traditional model can last without adopting some of its mechanisms (as the NYT has done so already, by creating newsletters).
sure—i’m not saying that legacy media is fine as is, and i’m not saying everything on substack is doomed. and i tried to be explicit that there are plenty of publications hosted on substack that function like normal publications, and i have no bone to pick with those. but i continue to think that, in general, edited publications are better than blogs. not always….but most of the time.
I am English and get most of my book reviews from the Guardian, TLS, LRB and NYRB. Many, many of them seem to me to lack a real clarity about the quality of what they are reviewing, going through the well tested motions of some author biography, plot summary and a cursory judgement on quality, often tagged on at the end. Some of the criticism on Substack, including yours, is better. Your book is excellent. I look forward to the next.
I think you're right about a lot of this but I am not sure about criticism tbh—I see writing on here that is not amateurish or polemical (in some political sense) that I also think would not get published by an institutional publication because it's insufficiently "hook-y."
So I dunno—I do think a lot of the good conversation about books is concentrated here right now, even if that represents a tiny number of substacks in general. If I had to choose between only reading the substacks I like vs the NYT Book Review, it would be an extremely easy choice to make. I agree with you in general but I think you might be rating "legacy media" a little too highly.
I’m also unsure. There is more good criticism on here than reporting (I don’t think I’ve ever seen good reporting on here?), and I might pick the criticism here over the criticism in *some* legacy publications, but I don’t think i would take a random piece on here over one in a good literary magazine basically ever
I ran this thought experiment with better publications - the NYT Book Review sucks and is not really criticism, thus barely the same genre as good Substack critics - and limits on the amount of Substack. Would I pick the NYRB over 5 good Substacks? 10? 20? Or the LRB over the entirety of Substack? I would be really sad to lose the LRB, but I think it would be hard to choose any single legacy publication over the whole of Substack, because I am not interested in everything in the LRB and Substack has such wide genre and style (and ofc also quality) variety. But would I choose Substack over 2-3 legacy publications? I'm not sure.
I think this starts to get into personal vibe/taste...I really like to read a LOT about things I am intensely interested in at the moment, not the curated selection fed to me in an issue of a magazine. I just constitutionally love the internet and its volume and messiness; I absolutely cannot relate to Becca's dread of a million emails. I can never get enough emails, even if I don't read them. Give me all the notifications, everywhere all the time. (I know this is insane, and I do consciously struggle against it - sometimes.) Just one or two magazines would maybe feel inert, quiet, and sad to me. I hate reading things by myself and not having anyone to talk to about them! Maybe this means Substack is bad because I'm using the internet to avoid meeting real people to talk to things about, or maybe it's fine because I am using it to meet them right now. But that's why it seems like I would have to get a LOT of legacy publications - ARCHIVES INCLUDED - to take them over Substack in the deal.
for me the answer is clear. i'd pick LRB. but for me substack is a different thing. substack is a slightly elevated version of being on instagram or whatever most of the time, so it's not really competing with the lrb for me (it would lose)
I don't think it really competes for me, either! I want both. But it's definitely more than "an elevated version of Instagram," and it's no wonder that kind of statement annoys Substack people (not including me). My instagram is a bunch of men posting shirtless photos of themselves and dumb politics stories from the exact same account; my Substack is full of really smart people writing about what they read.
yeah, I mean, I partly picked the NYT bc even though it mostly sucks right now, all of us (except Becca, for technical reasons) would of course review a book for them if asked. Even if the resulting piece was actually _less good_ than what we would write on Substack after being compressed and edited into the NYT house style, we'd all do it—I mean I'd certainly do it [call me NYT book desk]—and we'd do it because it's The New York Times™️ which is somehow both a constant punching bag and a coveted honor.
I don't think I'd take the whole of Substack over the TLS (to which I cannot actually afford to subscribe to lol) but a big part of that is that the TLS actually covers a really wide range of books, whereas if I was stuck with All Of Substack vs Harper's (a magazine I really like / admire / want to write for one day) the books discussed would be so much narrower. Similarly, Bookforum is great—it's a relief that they're back and I happily subscribe—but it feels kind of easy for me to guess who will be in the issue and what they're going to cover etc.
(And again I'm just talking about criticism.… Reporting is a different animal. Even if I think legacy media isn't really covering itself with glory there, it's still a different thing.)
I don't know if this quite fits into our convo here or is a side point, but I think it's a point for Becca's "institutionalism." If I had to pick between having all the legacy publications and their archives vs. Substack THAT would be an exceedingly easy choice. Because even though I currently read a high volume of Substack, one thing it does is sort legacy reading for me. Even though I'm not sitting down with print copies of those mags, I am very very often clicking on links from a Substack or googling "lrb thomas mann" or "nyt book review [author i belatedly discovered]". The institution is an organizer/preserver of writing over time and a mark of quality that Substack as a whole does not, and maybe can never, have. If I google "LRB proust" I know I will surely find great reviews of biographies, translations, possibly by top scholars in the relevant field; if I google "Substack Proust," there's no telling.
And yes, Ion the reporting point Becca is even more right. I keep seeing Substack people say the extremely naive things I said about blogging in the 2000s and people said about Twitter in the 2010s, that clearly do not understand/value what reporting is and how fucking expensive the good kind is. Most Substack people are (rightly) talking about critical/cultural debates, but there are definitely some people who talk about it replacing the media as a whole.
yes in All Of Substack vs All Of Print Media + Archives, print media wins… that one is easy. (adjusting the terms here only because, for professional reasons, i want to be able to look at zines…)
also (in terms of idiosyncrasies of taste) I think part of what I like about Substack is that there's a wider range of tones—to use one of Becca's examples, I like The Drift a lot (and have written for them), but it also feels like it was born already conceiving of itself as an established institution. I know I said this… somewhere… but everybody wants to be the Partisan Review in the little magazine space and this produces a kind of narrow understanding of what seriousness is, how one treats a topic seriously etc.
there is still a place in those magazines for people who are a bit offbeat / did not go to graduate school / whatever (like me!) but it's a noticeable thing.
to your point about reporting - I find it insane how many otherwise-smart people I encounter who just don't seem to know what reporting is. like literally, they do not comprehend what goes into it and what it does and doesn't encompass (unproved attributions of intention, e.g.!). I'm not a writer, but the only reason I don't have crippling student loans is my mother's longtime position at a frequent-punching-bag national newspaper, and you would not believe the number of times I've explained to (again: smart!) people in their 20s/30s that she has literally never met most of her "colleagues" from the opinion pages. I do suspect the way articles get shared on social media has done a lot to mentally collapse that distinction - a months-long reported investigation, a movie review, david brooks saying whatever pops into his head: they're all just twitter links! - which in turn makes it seem like substack is a plausible way forward when it is very much not. bad! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Very bad!!!! Yes I’ve been shocked in reading some of the most uninformed responses to the Bezos development to see how many people have no understanding of the difference
between reporting and op eds ☠️
Part of the problem is that too much 'reporting' from mainstream media the past five years reads more and more like op-eds. Especially when it comes to anything touching the culture wars. Ergo, unsurprisingly the two become blurred in the public eye.
at risk of sounding annoying, while i do agree with the vast majority of your points, i think the terminology here is really important - really, we're not talking about "substack" vs. "legacy" models so much as "influencer" vs. "institution" models.
like, for example - i'm sure to you (correct me if i'm wrong), you are primarily a book critic at the washington post. i am *aware* that you're a book critic at the washington post, but that's not how i encountered you - lyta gold (i think?), whose substack i also follow, had you in her list of "other substack recommendations" or whatever it's called on here, and that's how i stumbled upon you, and (i'm not proud to admit this) i have spent much more time reading the posts here than i have your clearly superior and institutionally-edited posts over at WP.
i bring that up as an example because at least when i see folks advocating the "influencer" (substack) model, they're usually making an argument about reach more than anything. speaking as a left-of-center zoomer, though i intellectually understand that there are actual human beings putting in real elbow grease to produce valuable reporting at legacy publications, in the main, i have basically only ever seen legacy media institutions (and Legacy Institutions™️ in general) completely shit the bed, every single day, several times a day, at such a scale that the stink it produces spreads even to the work of writers and reporters working there whose output i otherwise quite like. as a result, i don't really go to legacy institutions to find writers i like anymore - i just go to the individual writers who i already follow and trust and see which writers they recommend.
i don't really like that state of affairs, and in theory i'd prefer a less personalist and more institutional way of doing things. the problem is, of course, that alternative institutions need to be built - and they *are* being built in certain corners. i am currently working on a piece about the wave of independent media orgs that sprouted up over the last few years (404, Hellgate, Rascal, Aftermath, etc.) and a lot of them are doing quite well! with that said, the ones that seem to excel the most are those that are targeting a specific niche, either topical or geographical, and i think it's very possible that the legacy media model - the sort of publication that can simultaneously house boots-on-the-ground reporting on every important social issue and also cooking recipes, Wordle, op-eds, media criticism, and pay the people doing these things a living wage while remaining profitable - is just flat-out not possible in the long-term sans oligarchs (or other financial arrangements that produce similar ethical liabilities).
i don't know enough about the internal economics to say that definitively, but i think the fact that it hasn't already been done in spite of the growing (and, from where i can see, already quite large) demand for it suggests that it might not be.
I think you’re right that this is a better terminological distinction! Because I don’t think a lot of small literary magazines have “shit the bed” in the same way…but I do think they’re much better than substack (and I think that’s where a lot of my own best work has appeared, over the years)
I'm inclined to agree that the "conglomerate" model may not last much longer. Most legacy magazines culled their coverage of opera, non-pop music, dance, and visual art some decades ago, and now they are doing so with poetry and literature more generally. We will likely see a growing niche-ification (sorry!) of cultural journalism--a Pitchfork for poetry, a Letterbox for fiction, etc.
That said, I can't think of a single major 20th c. critic who was not part of an institution, whether academic or publication based. Menken, Wilson, Sontag, Greenberg, Kael, Bangs, Sarris, Trilling, Baldwin, etc. were all affiliated with specific magazines. Partisan Review had a "house style" as much as the _New Yorker_., and even great critics managed to work within those stylistic confines.
So I'm skeptical that literary/cultural criticism will work like "influencer" culture. Lots of people have sold shoes, lotions, sweatpants, etc. without an institutional affiliation. Very few critics have impacted popular or elite taste without a defined institutional perch. Would James Wood's taste matter if he only wrote for Substack? Would Richard Brody's? Jerry Saltz? Ta Nehisi-Coates? Mark Greif's? Jon Baskin's? Becca Rothfield's?
I doubt it. The sociologist in me thinks that institutions--even web-only institutions--still matter a great deal in disseminating cultivated opinion, precisely, because cultural value is so subjective and disputable, and people want to entrust their opinions (perhaps unfortunately) to a certified, badge-wearing gatekeeper. I'm actually okay with a modest amount of gatekeeping, as its what allows informed conversation to happen between moderately learned parties (rather than randos on GoodReads).
That's true historically about institutions. But that was in the early and middle of the last century. Things are changing.
They have already changed. What exactly is cultivated opinion other than a NYC centric mindset?
this is why I hope that substack starts letting writers aggregate together. you could kind of reverse engineer a print publication by being able to pay one subscription that gives you access to, for instance, a cultural critic, a film writer, short fiction, political coverage, etc. I think that would mirror the chatter that already happens on here between writers. that product would look less like a blog and more like a symposium or something
but i wonder then what the advantage of this is, over a magazine? i agree that it would be better, but it kind of strikes me as re-inventing the wheel (the wheel being the magazine)
I think the benefit derives from the fact that the internet/social media already pushes people toward 'following' individuals rather than the more conventional option of subscribing to publications. I think that the push toward parasociality means that there is a greater appetite for a publication that centers the writers themselves over the larger and more abstract identity of the magazine. Aggregating substacks would be a way to channel these micro cults of personality toward something more communal and less atomized. Sure, you lose something in terms of institutional structure/editorial scaffolding, but it seems like a more organic way to bring reading fanbases together. It has the added benefit of introducing readers to other writers that they might like. the substack 'recommend' feature already does this to a certain extent. there is also just the simple problem that writers are always in conversation with each other, and it feels like a bad fit to begin with if you have to subscribe to each one individually to get the whole dialogue.
It's not that a magazine couldn't do this, it's more that magazines aren't currently doing this (at least, not with the people I'm interested in reading) and this seems to me like the path of least resistance.
that's fair enough! the parasocial dimension is definitely much stronger here than in magazines
Love your writing, even the rants, but I'm hoping that the lowercase policy doesn't last....it's much harder to read.
Fair enough! I was just very cranky lol
All good points. My uncle was a reporter at the Washington Post in the Watergate era. If he were still alive, I’d be forwarding him your thoughts! Apropos of the variety of content in “legacy media,” I am reminded that back when the New Yorker published Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” the magazine didn’t clearly separate reporting from fiction. The public outrage that ensued can be at least partly explained by some readers’ confusion over what was real. All of which is to say, even the media dinosaurs can grow and change. Unfortunately too many of them seem to be changing out of institutional cowardice, but that might be me channeling my grumpy uncle. Anyway, thank you for your work!
Great piece -- the only place where I hear arguments about Substack being a viable alternative to 'legacy' media are from people on Substack. When I (reluctantly) bring up Substack in real life, the reactions range from 'oh that's nice that you have a lil blog :)' to 'what is a substack?', which I think are the right reactions at this point. It's frankly embarrassing to admit to people that I have a newsletter on here lol. I've had a few times where people ask about my writing and I mention Substack, then they nod politely and follow up with 'but what are you actually writing?' That's still the perspective of most readers: real writing is in magazines, newspapers, books, zines, etc, and substack is a silly online thing. Maybe we should listen to those readers.
But yeah I'm also increasingly with you on the 'there are too many substacks'. I open up my inbox and there's like 30 new emails and it's unsustainable. Reading newsletters has kind of messed up my reading life -- been reading a lot less physical magazines, and even books, and I've been writing worse things without the assistance of editors. This platform is being sold as a sweet deal for writers, but I think in the long run it will be bad for the vast majority of writers. I guess the solution (for me) is to write less on here but the instant gratification is so enticing... why labor on longer and more challenging projects that might never see the light of day when I can post something quickly here and get my instant dopamine hit. Ugh!
Yeah, for me browsing substack has basically brcomr what browsing Twitter used to be. I try not to think of most of my time on here as actual reading time, which sort of helps me keep it limited, but like all social media it’s kind of addictive…
I recommend adding all your favorite substacks to an RSS reader. Works for both paid and free, and you can stop receiving the emails and have them all together in a more landing-page type thing
that's a really good idea... thanks!
Agreed. 100%. In trying to think of a time when the media wasn’t owned by the wealthy. Some, sure, are owned by many. Some are owned by “the state.” But journalism is expensive. That’s why the media loves advertising! But then they loved it too much, and their readers became datapoints, and the editors forgot about the audience. And then the internet freaked everyone out and instead of getting printy-er, print tried to become more like the internet, which was a lost battle from the start. But what do I know? I host a podcast. About magazines! Which has made me slightly optimistic about the future of print as indies explore new business models. Though I’m not necessarily optimistic about the future of journalism. That’s a whole other podcast. Probably.
This piece really needed an editor.
so true
Thank you for clarifying this topic. I think you are uniquely positioned to talk pros and cons bc few Substackers also work on legacy media. I wish more writers would talk about the habits of mind that good editing produces. When you read a typical NY’er piece by Menand, Gopnik, Mead, etc you can feel the hand of intensive editing. Same is true of n+1, etc. not all their pieces are great, but their best work exceeds 99% of Substack. And editing does play a huge role in that. It’s like trying to make a funny movie by yourself va working with a team of writers ….
yeah, and editing is not always good! sometimes stuff is flattened to conform to house style. but the best writing of all, i think, is produced by collaborations between the best editors and the best writers
On the question of how newspapers and magazines *could* be structured: perhaps the recent wave of worker-owned / cooperative publications such as Defector or Hell Gate points to another path forward? I’ve been heartened by their success so far, as the model seems to capture many of the strengths of “legacy media” that you lay out while avoiding the dangers of oligarchic control. In any case, thanks for another great blog!
yeah, i think that is definitely the most promising way forward! and the non-profit model of, e.g., pro publica, which someone else pointed out
First off, thanks for specifying that you think my writing is great. I appreciate it. I actually don't have much else to say other than that I'm largely in agreement with you. I like Substack but I also like the lit and culture mags, and the mags still have the best pieces.
I suspect that you and I are kilometres apart politically, but I agree with you. Legacy newspapers are news outlets, like substack opinion pieces could never be. Yes, we can get some news from opinion pieces, but that always depends upon someone else having done some reporting first.
The thing I like the British press, which I find far better written and more interesting than its American counterpart, is that they have so many newspapers, all written from a different perspective. If you want the conservative view, you can read the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Express the Sun or the Times. If you lean to the left, then there's the Grauniad or the Independent.
Number 1 is very true, but there have been developments on this from. Drop Site has managed to figure out a way to fund reporting, as has The Pillar. (Just using these as examples, not endorsing their content.) So there is a way.
I see Substack more as a tool, one among many. I don't see how the traditional model can last without adopting some of its mechanisms (as the NYT has done so already, by creating newsletters).
sure—i’m not saying that legacy media is fine as is, and i’m not saying everything on substack is doomed. and i tried to be explicit that there are plenty of publications hosted on substack that function like normal publications, and i have no bone to pick with those. but i continue to think that, in general, edited publications are better than blogs. not always….but most of the time.
I am English and get most of my book reviews from the Guardian, TLS, LRB and NYRB. Many, many of them seem to me to lack a real clarity about the quality of what they are reviewing, going through the well tested motions of some author biography, plot summary and a cursory judgement on quality, often tagged on at the end. Some of the criticism on Substack, including yours, is better. Your book is excellent. I look forward to the next.
There’s bad stuff in magazines sometimes too, for sure, but nonetheless I rate them better on the whole. Thanks for your kind words about my writing!
Pretty much agree with all of this.
We will see if Substack evolves into something bigger and better than it is now.