AMA with Substack and Matt Taibbi about a new business model for journalism

The following isn't phrased how I would put it, but seems apt anyway:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17240003

I am amused that the typo is from "Huffington" rather than "Chicago Reader".

Why isn't this thread hidden?

So moral purity is a requirement for notable achievement now?

We subscribe to the pg take on naming. We went through a couple of options we like, and Substack was the one we could get the .com for. It's a Stack for Subscription publishing. We didn't realize about the node developer with the Twitter handle; hopefully it's different enough that it's not a pain for either of us.

See http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

I got excited I was about to read an AMA with substack.

It also sounds too techie-sounding for the average writer, versus something like "TinyLetter". Though I guess they're used to it with things like "blog", "Tumblr", and "pod/vodcast"

Just to avoid any confusion: we are not affiliated with James Halliday, the developer who uses the Github/Twitter handle substack.

(Though now that I look at it, I definitely respect his work, especially minimist)

This was confusing, I thought this was an AMA with James Halliday.

(random HN commenter opinion)

“Networking” and “cross pollination discovery of authors and readers” == community.

Community and free speech works with balanced diversity, where no one group can overwhelm another’s speech, especially during early childhood phases of a community’s development, before norms have emerged for the community to defend itself against threats external or internal.

So just to take on some of this -- the big problem with the old media model is that old media made its money on distribution. When you bought a newspaper you were mostly buying the expense and time they put in to making and delivering the news to you (the trucks, the paperboys, the newsstands, etc). Or you were advertising on a local TV station that had a quasi-monopoly with one of the few FCC licenses in an area. With the internet media firms no longer were really controlling distribution. Today 75% of the news comes from two distributors, Google and Facebook. So media has to figure out a new way to survive. People in the business have pored over this problem for decades. I don't see any way that it works without subscriptions. Any ad-based model is going to result in denuded clickbait-style coverage. The advantage the modern system has is that basically anyone can garner a large audience overnight, provided they're good at what they do. There's no middlemen, which means reduced costs, which means an opportunity for more independent reporting. We'll see. I'm guardedly optimistic and hope that companies like Substack will take off.

I can give the Substack take on this.

1. We think it's very scalable. The value of attention has flipped - you used to get bored and need to fill your time, now your time is the last scarce resource, so it makes sense to pay to use it more wisely. We see early adopters doing this happily now, but we think it will become the norm.

We also think it will be good for democracy. The incentives of ad supported social media encourage clickbait, cheap outrage, and hyper-partisanship. Subscriptions reward thoughtfulness and deep value.

The one thing I worry about is too much exclusivity. If we landed in a place with really high subscription prices and only the privileged few getting access to good information that wouldn't be ideal, but that is avoidable.

2. Mostly they will have to change. Some will be successful.

3. The new model is readers paying writers directly. The difference at internet scale is that you can reach everybody in the world, and therefore you can be more successful with a much more specific topic/audience. Also because of software, you can start doing it as an individual writer in an afternoon.

...and how is it worth twice as large a share as Patreon takes? (10% after the payment processor's fees, vs 5%)

We think Patreon is awesome. It's a great general purpose tool for supporting creators, and the fact that it is so successful shows that people are willing to pay for stuff they value.

Substack is focused on letting writers start their own publication - top to bottom - with subscriptions as an integral part.

Every time I see a comment like this, I think of http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.htm... .

It should be an even exchange: you pay for the product as it is, not as you want it to be. Yes, when real life intervenes and the 12 novel epic doesn't get completed because the author dies (R.I.P. Robert Jordan) that is a bummer, but even then I find it very confusing when people go "I'd rather not even start reading until the entire thing is done" (and personally I think Sanderson's end to the Wheel of Time was very nicely done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time).

To the degree that the world of modern software and release early, release often have trained people to expect a constant treadmill of content I think that is a net negative: if you're worried about the author's pace stop paying and resume when they are done. "what's to keep him or any other author from walking away at that point?" sounds like you expect him to be chained to his desk until his output meets your expectations.

"As a consumer, it's bad enough when I'm left in this situation when there's been no money exchanged (such as a series cancelled with the plot mostly unresolved)." just sounds incredibly entitled.

The idea that getting substantial recurring revenue helps put the author in a position to deliver, and avoid the "popular thing gets canceled" effect.

The relationship is between the reader and the writer, and the writer puts their reputation behind what they're doing. We see our job as to give them options if unexpected issues come up - pausing subscriptions, partial refunds, or whatever is necessary.

I think that's definitely going to be a major motivation for journalists going forward. The media landscape is becoming more and more rigid and it is becoming harder to challenge certain points through the old networks and newspapers. So having reporters be financially independent would be huge for investigative reporting, which is one of the areas that has been cut the most in the new era of clickbait media.

Another thing -- what Substack is trying to do is to solve a problem that has existed in media forever. Writers of all types have always been compensated in an indirect, convoluted way, by publishers who get some or all of their revenue from ads. This forces writers to address audiences through layers of middlemen who may or may not want to meddle in the material. The Substack model could end both direct and indirect censorship.

This was already debunked dumbass

I think the exact opposite is true. The problem with the “one click free” universe of tons of free content is that the reader naturally will search out - or be sought out, by algorithms - material he or she agrees with. That consumer takes less time to investigate alternative views and has less patience - something less mentally taxing is just a click away. When you pay, you’re making a commitment, and I think people both have higher expectations and are making a more reasoned, careful choice. We’ll see how it goes, but I think the subscription model is more likely to produce cool/experimental material than any model that tries to game Google/FB algorithms

Well, you'll probably end up getting two books over the course of the year, or something on the order of it -- This book is likely to be finished by September, and then I'll be starting on something new (I have a couple of projects I'm working on now). So over the course of 12 months, it will work out to be quite a lot of stuff. Thanks in any case for taking a look.

I would say we're more than half done. We still need to power through a big chunk of the story. It's kind of a high-wire act but we're both enjoying it.

I think letting a book evolve can have varying consequences. In reality you want it all to be stylistically consistent. But you can't publish 200 pages, see a problem, and change it on the fly. (Dostoyevsky appeared to do this in "The Possessed," changing from first to third person and back). On the other hand, the pressure of having to meet deadlines might make it more intense. So it could go either way. A lot of great, great books have been serialized and a lot of them had an hard-driving feel to them (In Cold Blood, I think, wss one, as were the Fear and Loathing books).

Matt is a publisher on the Substack platform. We take a 10% cut of his subscription revenue.

Because he is an established author, and we're really excited about this new format of serialized fiction, we have also been putting extra product development and publicity effort behind his publication. We think of this as Doing a Thing that Doesn't scale, as in http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Very not-white third founder from Substack checking in (North Indian, born and raised in Japan)

To address the question, one of the main benefits of our model (removing advertising from the equation) is that communities aren't incentivized to expose themselves to as many eyeballs as possible

From that lens, you can see how not trying to maximize eyeballs/clicks can be great for diversity. It's totally fine for them to find the people who care deeply about the community's purpose without being watered down by the outside majority. To me that allows all sorts of unique communities to emerge and be financially supported in a way that ensures their survival

Not from Substack, but the answer is that people reliably look at their inboxes and open the emails.

I think micropayments don't work.

Even if you make payment as completely frictionless as possible, there is still the mental overhead of deciding to pay. As the dollar amount gets smaller and smaller, the "pain of deciding to pay" becomes a higher fraction of the total pain, and the economics don't make sense. Plus, if you just charge for each click or whatever, you get the bad incentives of clickbait back.

Subscriptions are great because you only have to make one (big) decision. Subscribing to individual writers is great, because the thing you are deciding is do you like/trust/want to keep reading this writer, which is something that people actually do have strong feelings about.

As distribution has become free, the value of content has been driven to zero. But now the value of curation -- of reading somebody you trust -- gets higher. That's what people are willing to pay for.

Honestly, we are seeing a lot of strength in the crypto newsletters on Substack and we love them. There are plenty of genres that are out-performing some of them – from absurdist humor to bankruptcy industry coverage to foreign policy – but the truth is that the writer matters more than the subject. People subscribe to writers they trust. Those reader-writer relationships are key in this world.

> to advocate for parents to test their minor children without the child's knowledge for drug use

This seems kind of overbearing. Why do think this is something important to advocate for?

Brand new account, -4 Karma. This is spam.

Good questions.

To answer the burn-out point: I think this is something writers have to take into account when they're starting their publishing businesses. Running a publication is definitely a demanding exercise and it is often under-estimated. That said, I think Ben Thompson, for example, handles this problem well: he makes it clear to Stratechery's subscribers that he regularly takes some time off to recharge, and he lets them know well in advance when he's going to take a break.

This is one of the areas we hope Substack can be helpful in, actually. We are building up a knowledge base of best practices, informed by the people who are publishing with our tools, so we can help all kinds of writers succeed. Part of the advice we offer relates to content strategy, pricing, cadence, etc, and part of it relates to less tangible stuff, like how to manage your own time and expectations.

And yes, converting readers from free to paid is a huge and unending challenge! We focus a lot of our effort on solving this very problem. One small piece of advice we offer is for a writer who is contemplating going paid to clearly signal the transition in advance to their readers, then give them incentives to subscribe early – like a special charter price, for instance. More broadly, Neil Cybart from Above Avalon shared some useful thoughts on the subscriber model recently. This comment stood out:

"Going from a scenario in which all content was public to one in which only a fraction of content is public can be jarring. Most sites have handled this transition by keeping content free and instead giving paid subscribers a very marginal amount of exclusive content. In essence, sites are treating subscriptions and memberships like donations. This is not sustainable for or attractive to subscription-based models."

What Neil is saying there is that it is better to set the expectation that the bulk of your content be available only for paying subscribers.

Chris from Substack here not Matt. The great thing about the Substack model is that it is a big financial opportunity. We help writers get paid, and we take a cut of that so that we're aligned.

What that means is that if we are successful, we get to build a sustainable company that does this important thing.

Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, we've given a lot of thought to that.

So I started my career in "traditional" journalism, working for a nice little newspaper called the Moscow Times, but the problem there was they wouldn't let you write with humor or break certain formats. So I quit and ended up several times self-publishing by putting out newspapers, which is hilarious in context -- these days people just need to type something and upload it, but we used to have to painstakingly design every page, create huge metal plates, print off them, make giant stacks of newspapers, distribute them (I've even done the distribution on my own, in cars), just to be "self-published." Also I had to sell ads back in the day! With the internet came blogging, which is obviously much simpler but the problem, again, always comes back to representing a larger financial outlet, not wanting to clash with an editor or advertisers over material, having to haggle over what to write about and when. Substack is basically just the writer and the reader and it's very painless. I think in the future you'll see a lot of writers and media personalities breaking off and using this kind of format.

Re discovery: Yes!

We want the writers to succeed, and while it's ultimately up to them to write something good enough that people want to subscribe, getting discovered is something we can help with.

Having a place to feature them will help with this (though it's less important right now than e.g. helping free posts get shared.)

In fact, we have a super basic version of this that we wrote in 20 minutes here: https://www.substack.com/discover but we have a ton of plans on how to make it better - most importantly by focusing on the author & publication as the key element rather than the post.

Clear and honest messaging to your readers about why you're doing this and what the benefits will be for them. Also: let's talk? You can email us at hello at substack dot com

I hope so. Serialization was such a huge thing for writers once upon a time. In particular it was a medium that encouraged experimentation and allowed writers to be compensated better for unusual work. It's how a lot of American detective writing got its start -- the fast pace of work like Dashiell Hammett's "Continental Ops" stories was built around the immediacy of periodical publishing. If you're writing that kind of prose as a book, it has a different style. The periodical form helped create that unique, suspenseful, fast format. My hope is that in the internet age -- when people are reading more as a whole but maybe reading fewer books -- that a serial web formal will help create a literature for readers of this era, just like magazines like "Black Mask" helped make a literature for the twenties and thirties.

My father, who is also a reporter, used to have one important tool, a rolodex (for those too young to know, this used to be a rolling phone card file). Every night he came home and did a thing he called a "phone attack," where he randomly called all his sources -- not for stories, but just to touch base, chat, listen to what's going on in their lives. This is basically all you need to do to be a good reporter, maintain a lot of relationships with people in different walks of life. It's hard work but very rewarding. If you don't have people with their ears to the ground, you're lost. So like my father I try to regularly stay in touch with all sorts of people, and never to call a source for a favor if I haven't recently called socially, or just to check in. People hate feeling used.

We are, and it is an interesting problem!

I don't want to get too deep into the details here other than to say at a product level we're focused on being respectful with the access we get to people's inboxes. We hate junk mail as much as everybody else, and being good citizens is necessary (but not sufficient) to deliver lots of email.

So I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't read that book, but I imagine I've read almost all of Jesse's articles from that time period, as we were both covering essentially the same story. Along with Gretchen Morgenson of the Times, Jesse was one of the first reporters to start asking the question of why no one from the crisis era went to jail. I gather from the title alone that he traversed a lot of the same area I did in "The Divide," which was significantly about the pusillanimous Justice Department not wanting to take on complex financial cases. Jesse is a great reporter so I will definitely check it out.

As a writer who has worked with a number of great editors over the years: I agree. In the short-term, the best writers will recognize the value of having an editor and factor that expense into their business models. Ultimately, I'd love to see an ecosystem evolve where editors can sell their services to writers who want to improve their publications. I see that as a pretty exciting opportunity for a platform like Substack at some point in the future.

Thanks. We agree that there is definitely a promising market in those fields, too.

We'll definitely look for ways to make the product better for readers and writers.

You can already add pictures. We are testing comments for paid subscribers on a couple of publications (you heard it here first!) And that other stuff is definitely interesting.

What will not change is that the experience for the reader will stay really simple - Sign up, and everything you need shows up in your email. Also the model will stay focused on letting readers pay writers directly for high quality content, because that's the magic.

It's completely different and fun. This is kind of an in-between change for me. Oddly enough working with my anonymous partner has been a real help -- my own natural voice is probably wordier and slower on the page, but he has a great natural narrative voice and gets to the point a lot more quickly. So trying to replicate his voice, I think, has made the material different and more fast-paced than I could have done on my own. It's been a blast, the most fun I've had writing in ages.

Maybe read the first chapter and then decide? ;)

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/chapters-one-and-two-the-busin...

Wow. I would say -- let me just back up and say that generally the job of investigative reporting is mostly about getting up to speed as quickly as possible about really complicated topics, and then communicating what you've learned in readable prose in as short a time period as possible. So the biggest challenge is when you have the hardest, most complex subjects. After the 2008 crash I was given a general assignment to explain what happened, and since I knew nothing about Wall Street, I basically had to learn about ten years' worth of financial practices in the space of maybe eight weeks. Those early stories about Goldman and AIG were both thrilling and terrifying because it was so much to digest.

Another fun one (in retrospect) - I don't know if this is investigative journalism exactly, but I was once involved with what in hindsight was a very crazy caper: a Russian newspaper called "Stringer," for whom I worked occasionally, had a contact who was willing to sell them a week of wiretapped phone calls from Putin's chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin. I ended up doing the writeup of that story. There were some minor improprieties exposed in the transcripts, but nothing world-shaking. Still, I was so terrified about publishing it that I left the country. And when I returned, I was detained at Sheremetyevo airport for hours. It turned out the problem was an unlamented passport page. I thought I was going to prison forever.

We're working on this! Right now most people discover through the author's networks, and from people sharing free content.

We made a super basic discovery feature (that's just chronological free posts) here: https://www.substack.com/discover but we need to make that a lot better now that the home page is starting to get appreciable traffic :)

I miss it, too. Alex is one of my favorite people on earth.

Thank you for subscribing!

The main protection is that it's really hard to get people to pay you money if you don't have evidence of substance. It's harder to make paybait than clickbait.

That said, it is definitely an issue we will have to navigate carefully.

I like your analysis of the "problems" from an industry perspective. Here's the user perspective:

(1) The problem with subscriptions is that it's unfathomable to subscribe all over the place. I live in New Jersey, so I'm not going to subscribe to the LA Times even if they have some great coverage of a particular topic.

(2) The problem with ads is that they are INSANELY annoying to see all the time. Period.

My company, reallyread.it, is going to be uniquely positioned to make "pay per use" (aka just reading something) a reality. It's the Holy Grail for all of us: Spotify for News - one premium subscription that unlocks everything, everywhere. We're on it. ;)