For my regular contribution to Lachlan Cartwright’s Breaker Media newsletter, I was asked to reflect on what I saw as the big media stories of 2025. This what I came up on a tight deadline...

Here are five major happenings from 2025 that are worth further comment, even in these darkest of days when no one is paying attention to their email.

Big Thing 1: AI is reshaping us

There might be a debate about whether or not this is a bubble moment, but there is no doubt that AI products, and chatbots in particular, are now mainstream, entrenched, and reshaping how people get information. More time in chatbots means less time on traditional search, less time seeking out news sites, and more personalized information. But! It also increases the importance of person-to-person relationships, where each participant has real skin in the game. Even as we get more media from robots, we want more connection with humans. We want, and need, to share stories with each other. That’s an opportunity.

Big Thing 2: YouTube is king

Everyone within spitting distance of the New York Media Industrial Complex is obsessed with what’s happening at the TV stations, newspapers, and magazine empires, but they all are just mites in a bed that is built, made, and slept in by YouTube, which dominates news, commentary, and entertainment, and is well on the way to taking over not just our personal devices but also the living room. This was the year that Neal Mohan became the big, sexy boss that everyone wants to press flesh with. Next year could be the backlash—and if it happens, expect it to come from the conflict between the company’s “creator-first” messaging and the increasing abundance of AI-produced content (which is friendly to YouTube’s business model).

Big Thing 3: Paramount Skydance acquired The Free Press

When David Ellison’s company acquired Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, it was big news for obvious political and cultural reasons—and insider media gossip—but to me the most significant story was that a new text-focused news and opinion publication had started from scratch, grown to significant revenue based on direct subscriptions, and then sold for a major sum after just three years. The media was supposed to be dying! Turns out that there is room for new entrants. There is room for reinvention.

Big Thing 4: Traditional media is washed out

There are a few traditional media institutions left standing—the New York Times, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and a handful of others—but the year 2025 confirmed that almost every other traditional media institution has completely lost influence. Worse: their businesses may not be recoverable. This reality is not the same thing as saying the media business is dead—it’s just not going to look like it has looked for the last 100 years. Even some of the biggest titans of that era won’t make the leap to the new era. This year has confirmed that we’re firmly in rebuilding territory now, even if the chaos of social media obfuscates the progress.

Big Thing 5: Direct relationships are the way forward

The traditional media system once thrived on direct relationships, with the big brands having built trust with their audiences over decades. That all fell to pieces in the social media era, when tech companies figured out how to best take advantage of the internet to monopolize attention and therefore ad dollars. The social media companies aren’t going to give up their riches any time soon, so the people who care about trustworthy media will have to build direct relationships with audiences all over again, except this time without relying on programmatic advertising and without letting the big platforms dictate what they can and can’t do with those audiences. In 2025, it has become clear that—because of platforms like Substack—publishers can benefit from network effects that a platform brings without having to sacrifice the control of their audience relationships.

Happy holidays and here’s to a bright 2026!

Our discussion covered how writers are coming to enjoy new powers and what becomes possible when you control your relationship with your audience. We also dove into some nitty-gritty Substack details and what might be coming in the future, including thoughts about sponsorships, bundling, and why everyone should beware of programmatic advertising, a technology sent from the masters of the simulation to control our feeble minds.

Cheers.

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I am developing a small theory about the evolution of online ecosystems, and I’d love to hear feedback about how it resonates and where it breaks.

My idea is that there are three major evolutionary stages in the lifecycle of an online ecosystem as it moves from emergence to maturity: foundational technology → applications → civic system design.

Technologies start as inventions, then become applications, then become systems for governing social reality.

Each of these stages can be clearly observed in the evolution of online media.

1. Foundational technology: websites.

In the first era of online media, we invented websites. These were destination pages on the web that gave us a way to explore, and take advantage of, the internet. For the first few years, these sites were largely disconnected from each other and were (mostly) not augmented by identity. These websites had limited utility and relatively weak economic value.

2. Applications: social networks

With the advent of MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the likes, we found a way to build websites that could be networked tightly together and augmented by an identity layer, so anyone, without needing tech know-how, could have a presence on the web and a way to extract value from the internet. The applications that emerged in this stage had enormous utility and generated tremendous economic value, but they were developed “on the go” with little foresight for social and civic consequences. Their business models were reverse-engineered to fit apps that had already been built.

3. Civic system design: distributed publishing networks

Having learned what can be built on the web, and how the internet’s qualities can be harnessed for connectivity, communication, and economic value, we are now moving into an era where online media systems can be designed for better civic outcomes. This is what we are trying to do with Substack: build a system that offers the full distribution and connectivity benefits of an internet-scale network while marrying all of that to a business model and governance structure that produce good outcomes for culture and society. It’s a work in progress, but Substack has learned from the mistakes and successes of applications built in the previous generation of online media.

In this way, we can see how the online media ecosystem has moved from invention to utility to system design over the course of three decades.

This basic structure also applies to online marketplaces. We started with foundational payments technology, with PayPal enabling financial transactions over email. Then we saw the emergence of mega marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. Now we’re primed for something like a Substackified marketplace, which might look like a combination of Shopify—which gives merchants control over their customer relationships—and Amazon, which offers a centralized shopping interface.

We can also see how the framework applies to the current AI revolution. Large language models are the foundational technologies, allowing for new applications such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Granola, Delphi, and so on. The cultural consequences of the AI revolution’s applications era are yet to be determined, but it’s a reasonable bet that the intentional systems design for better civic outcomes will come in a later period, after some unintended consequences.

I imagine this framework can also apply to offline systems, too, such as transportation, energy, and agriculture. Or is it more complicated than that?

I would appreciate critiques, edits, and any other attempts to help advance this line of thought. Please feel free to share feedback in the comments below!

We’ve just moved into this office in NoMad after a couple years in a more boutique spot five blocks north, so it was a good test of the shiny new space. It held up! More than a hundred Substack bestsellers filled the room.

I kicked off the evening with remarks about what Notes is for and why we built it. (In short: to give power to creators and consumers.) Below is the slightly edited transcript of that speech—with ums, ahs, and ramblings conveniently elided—so you can get a sense of why Substack is, somewhat counterintuitively, building the very thing it was designed to challenge: social media.

Thanks to for providing the basis of this transcript in his review of the event, which you can also read below (and ignore the stupid photo of me mugging, which, Jason, I had assumed was for private use!):

New York Cartoons

Notes on Notes (and Why I’m Cautiously Optimistic about Substack)

October 22nd, 2025…

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10 months ago · 44 likes · 7 comments · Jason Chatfield

“We get a lot of questions and concerns from people who are confused as to why Substack is becoming more like a social network, when we are supposed to be almost the opposite. So let me explain.

The way most writers and creators build their audiences and revenue—with some exceptions, and congratulations to those who don’t—is by going on social media to try to get exposure.

The problem is, those other social apps don’t really care about writers and creators. Their interests lie in creating a big, closed garden where you’re not in control—where you don’t own your audience, your relationships, or even your content.

So we wanted to create another option. Not necessarily a replacement, but a place to have your work discovered and talked about while still being in control. A place where you own your audience relationships, you own your content, and you have the freedom to leave whenever you want.

Social networks have gone in a strange direction. They’re designed to keep you trapped in an endless scroll because that’s what their business model requires. They need you to never leave the app. They don’t want you to go find a long-form story or build trust with a writer. They just want you to keep scrolling.

That’s a terrible direction for culture and media. Many of these platforms could even replaced real writers with AI bots and they would be happy about it. They deserve to be challenged—and our way of doing that is to build a system that connects real people with each other, not just with “content.”

We want you to grow. We want you to reach as many people as possible, influence as many people as possible, and make as much money as possible. And we’ve built our business model around that—we only make money when you make money. You have the right and ability to leave any time you want.

So we’re building a social layer that helps you do that—discovery, discussion, connection—but one that works in service of writers and readers. A network that gives creators power and gives consumers the ability to vote for the culture they want to support by voting with their dollars.

You might remember when social media actually felt fun. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—those early days were exciting, even wholesome. But as the business models evolved, they prioritised engagement over humanity. The game became: maximise addiction, not connection.

Substack’s version of a social network is an experiment in reversing that—in giving power back to writers and readers. We’ve designed a system that rewards deep relationships rather than fleeting attention.

And it’s working. In the last three months, the Substack app has driven over 32 million free subscriptions and nearly half a million paid subscriptions.

Subscribers using the Substack app are seven times more likely to share, like, comment, or re-stack your work.

The app is now the top source of subscriber and revenue growth for Substack publishers—even higher than recommendations.

As of eight months ago, more than a million posts are discovered every day through the app.

It’s still small compared to the big networks, but it has one huge advantage: the others are shrinking—and, frankly, shit—while this is growing, and it’s good.

So that’s the story of Notes, the story of the app, and where it’s headed.”

[Wild applause, flowers thrown on stage, McKenzie escorted from stage on a human chariot]

John Mulgan’s classic New Zealand novel Man Alone, which tells the story of a fugitive World War I veteran who escapes to the country’s desolate wilderness, has had a psyche-shaping effect on my home nation. Since its publication in 1939, Mulgan’s work has been echoed in films, television, and ads, contributing to a mythic image of the self-reliant male, resilient against the elements and stoic in the face of isolation. Man against nature. The hero’s journey with mosquitoes. Bear Grylls without the GoPro.

For many New Zealanders, the man, alone, is a symbol of national pride, a tribute to rugged self-determination. It probably sounds familiar. Other nations have their brave frontiersmen, plucky pioneers, and Huckleberry Finns, all conquerors of their own hearts of darkness. The United States has made a national religion of promoting individual liberty.

But Man Alone is actually a tragedy. Its protagonist can’t survive in the indifferent wilderness for long. The bush ultimately offers no redemption. He is eventually forced to return to civilization and face trial for the crime from which he fled—killing his farm boss in a drunken brawl. The same is true of most solitary heroes. A man alone can achieve a lot, and perhaps even sustain himself to the end of his days. But without connection to a greater community, his gains will dissipate instead of spread.

I am beginning to believe, though, that the rapid technological changes we are living through can provide the conditions for individual freedoms to thrive in concert with a co-operative civilization. We are starting to see models that realize the full potential of independence through connection to a network. Today’s solitary hero need not cede his liberty in order to enjoy a community’s embrace.

These developments are happening across sectors, with profound implications.

In energy, you can now have your own power station in your backyard, generating electricity from solar panels and storing it in a battery. You can live in solitude like this, if you choose, but you get greater benefit by contributing to and drawing from a grid that manages distribution and drives down the cost of electricity for the community.

With connectivity, you once had to live in an area with well-developed infrastructure and coverage from cell towers and fiber-optic cables. But now you can use a portable terminal that communicates with a satellite to access fast and reliable internet even in the middle of the ocean. You might live in isolation, but you can still be deeply connected to the rest of the world.

In publishing, you can now run your own media business without renting airwaves or paying for a printing press, while also being part of a network that enriches, rather than compromises, your ownership.

And with the rise of AI, you can enjoy cognitive superpowers without being embedded in an elite institution. Your ability to use that intelligence multiplies when it’s part of a larger exchange of ideas with others—including the development of large language models—that advance collective understanding.

Historically, we have been highly dependent on centralized systems to manage the distribution of resources. At least since the Industrial Revolution, we have been essentially forced to rely on civic institutions, corporate monopolies, and state-run infrastructure to manage trade, communication, and cooperation among dispersed populations. Opting out hasn’t been a serious option, and opting in has required acquiescence to a cumbersome machine that consolidates power and curtails personal autonomy.

But we’re now at a pivot point. Thanks to concurrent technological revolutions across society’s foundational sectors, we can realize tighter and mutually supportive bonds of connection while preserving individuality, independent expression, and self-determination. We can have our individuality cake and collectively eat it.

Of course, there is ample cause for skepticism. The last three decades of experience with the internet have shown that the original utopian promises of a more connected world can also lead to more social isolation, division, and corruption. The nuance is that the frontier technologies themselves are not enough. In fact, when they’re wielded carelessly, they can have counterproductive effects, sending us backwards instead of forwards. It has been a lonely decade for tech optimists.

But we have also seen that the right technologies wedded to considered models, with systems intentionally designed to both enable individuals and serve the collective good, can drive real progress. Self-driving cars reduce traffic accidents. Online marketplaces help independent farmers reach consumers. Decentralized clinical trials democratize medicine.

Individualism and community can meet and amplify each other: a source of agency, and a source of strength, in harmony. Man alone, together.

In the current cultural moment, particularly in the Western world, many are feeling the strain of political division and the despair of social decay. Still, it is not crazy to hope. It is clear now that we can design tech for individual autonomy that also feeds collective power, to the betterment of all involved. It’s a framework that serves an important human need: to not only understand and enhance oneself, but also to be part of something bigger; to be a contributor to, and beneficiary of, a shared sense of meaning.

In New Zealand, the Man Alone symbology continues to loom large in the national psyche, but it’s not the only shaper of cultural identity. New Zealand is a small and isolated country, tucked away in a turbulent corner of the South Pacific. Its land of treacherous mountains, wild oceans, and raging rivers is sublimely beautiful and casually hostile. It is a nation that cultivates pioneers and recluses, but also one in which people have always banded together to overcome the elements. Nowhere is that truth more evident than in its indigenous people, the Māori, whose culture is rooted in collectivist values, stressing the importance of family and ancestry. But Māoridom also venerates individual dignity and respect. In fact, the Māori term that encapsulates those values is one of the most important in the national lexicon: mana.

To earn mana, the custom goes, one must live in balance with the world, and care for others.

“He aha te mea nui o te ao?,” reads the start of a Māori proverb so resonant that millions of New Zealanders have it committed to memory. What is the most important thing in the world?

“He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.”

The people, the people, the people.

I. Riding with the cowboy poet

On February 8, 1996, as President Bill Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act into law, John Perry Barlow mounted a resistance. The Wyoming cattle farmer, technologist, and poet published A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, declaring the worldwide web a haven from governments that seek to put constraints on human thought. “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” he wrote.

Barlow, best known as a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, had believed in the promise of digital technology since the 1980s, when he found that an Apple Macintosh made it easier to run the 22,000-acre ranch on which he had been raised. As an early member of the online bulletin board The WELL, he came to revere the web’s ability to connect minds across space. In 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect civil liberties in the emerging digital world. The internet, he believed, was a liberating force. He said: “We are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire.”

We’ve since learned to be cynical about the internet. Instead of realizing Barlow’s digital utopia, we followed our naivete on a dark detour, seduced by a new gold rush and captivated by the allure of virality. We may have been entertained and even educated, but we increasingly feel surveilled and manipulated, too.

But Barlow’s early ideals weren’t mere naive illusions. They spoke to something pure and possible. They recognized the transformative power of an interconnected web of minds. Even amid the disappointments of the internet’s evolution, we have seen glimpses of how this new power can be harnessed for good. But it is only now, a full human generation later, that we’re getting to a place where it’s possible to see how Barlow’s dreams—or something close to them—can be realized.

Barlow was a believer, and so are we at Substack. We believe that the internet, supported by an infrastructure that preserves pro-social values, can be of tremendous service to humanity. With the right cultural operating system, the heart of Barlow’s vision can still be realized.

The cowboy poet can ride again.

II. Cognition wants to be free

Barlow was brought into The WELL by Stewart Brand, a founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and another foundational internet believer. As early as 1984, Brand identified the key tension that would come to complicate the hopeful visions of those who, like him, saw computers as a way to expand consciousness.

“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable,” he said at a hackers conference that year. “The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

We’ve been grappling with this tension for 40 years, with unsatisfying results. The information landscape online has come to be dominated by a handful of social media companies that have created a vast network of connected voices. That network has produced a lot of good in the world, but it rests on a foundation—an attention-oriented business model—that too often cheapens, coarsens, and corrodes human connection.

The problem isn’t the flow of content, but what the underlying infrastructure constrains downstream. While freeing information, it has imprisoned cognition. For a full generation, we have been lured into a game that compels us to surrender our agency to algorithms. We don’t go to the library anymore. We just go to the casino. Dopamine is our soma.

And now a new force stands to completely reshape how our minds interact online. The advent of artificial intelligence changes what each of us can do with information at a galactic scale. Today, almost anyone can wield more cognitive power than the old gods ever dreamed of. These powers are spreading across the world at fiber-optic speed, augmenting human thought, and in some cases replacing it. The internet and our minds are becoming awash with chatter as the effective cost of cognition falls toward zero. Cognition wants to be free.

But just as the over-abundance of information has changed the relationship we have with real human communication, a surfeit of cognition puts a premium on real human thought. We want to know that there’s a person on the other side of an idea. We feel less alone when we are regarded by others. When we seek to comfort those we love, we send them our thoughts. The robots may process information in unimaginable volumes, but we people can still hold the agency. Our minds, freely thinking together in cyberspace, can be the ultimate guardians of humanity.

At Substack, we are building tools and a network for real human connection—the infrastructure for cognitive freedom. Here is a meeting place for minds that care for culture. Here is a model that strengthens the bonds of online communities. A technology to help you think again. To reclaim your attention. To take back your mind.

III. The mind in the cloud

Our bodies don’t live on the internet, but, increasingly, our minds do. Much of our communication and discourse now takes place in online spaces that don’t have the designation of states but approximate their power. To a greater extent than ever in human history, we are organizing ourselves into a global culture where ideas pay little heed to borders and outpace our physical realities. This online population deserves better support than what the dominant systems have so far offered. We need civil infrastructure designed to help the collective mind flourish.

The Wild West of John Perry Barlow’s internet is long gone, but we haven’t yet advanced beyond the unruly boomtowns that have cropped up in its wake. The online tools and gathering places of the 1990s—from The WELL to GeoCities—held promise for a democratic (if messy) reimagining of expression and community, but they were ultimately eroded by social media’s more potent organizing model and commercial power. Facebook and TikTok won the attention game and now set the terms for a huge swath of modern culture.

The social giants, though, repeated the patterns of the early internet pioneers—focusing first on building products and audiences and only then worrying about the design of the civil infrastructure that supports them. The entire economic evolution of early social media can thus be summed up in four words: apps first, ethics later. The engineers and designers of the early platforms were so focused on making their products irresistible that they neglected to make them positive-sum.

There have always been winners in these games, of course, but the spoils get concentrated in the hands of the very few—not least, the rulers at the top. This effect comes not from bad intention or greed, but from the original failure to adopt an approach that prioritizes the population’s long-term health above the machine’s short-term financial interests.

The design of such infrastructure is critical, because it sets norms and regulates behaviors. The model, in this sense, is the cultural operating system, embodying a form of government, a political philosophy, and an economy all in one. The social media companies ultimately settled on an attention-focused model that now serves a massive online population that is increasingly rowdy and troubled. But this shortcoming clears the way for a new type of system, more intentionally designed, that promotes better mental hygiene. The conditions are ripe for a model that supports classically liberal values and connects humanity in trust relationships that are strengthened, rather than undermined, by its underlying economic system—even in a time of abundant and artificial cognitive capacity.

Unlike social media, the Substack model isn’t about top-down order or submission to a ruler’s whims. You get to set the terms of the culture you want to live in.

We are building a system that allows order to emerge through facilitating the free flow of information and thought, where people help one another understand the world and feel part of something larger than themselves. Every Substack, shaped by its creators and constituents, can be a community. It’s a model based on ownership and agency, valuing relationships over impressions. It fosters genuine human connection—a way to know and appreciate that there is a person on the other side of an idea.

We are striving to build Substack into a city worthy of the approval of Jane Jacobs, the celebrated author and urbanist. Successful cities, Jacobs said, don’t arise from central planning but from adaptive experimentation. They are living organisms, constantly shaped and reshaped by cooperation, interaction, and intention. “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody,” Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

Not everything in this new city will be perfect. There’ll still be crime, disputes, and traffic jams. But as we have already seen in the early days of Substack—with a population now in the many tens of millions—it can be a place where curiosity pays, and where light can be let

into the discourse. You can be understood here. People who use Substack already know it. The author George Saunders has described it as “social media purified by conscience.” Others have pointed to how Substack feels better and accommodates thoughtful conversation and good-faith disagreement. “There is more room for your ideas to breathe,” says one writer, “leaving more room for them to spread organically.”

In 1996, John Perry Barlow heralded “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” It was a beautiful vision, but it never found an operating system strong enough to sustain it. And so other ways won. For a while. But here we are, back at the beginning, with new technologies reordering Cyberspace again, wondering what the next era of the interconnected mind will look like.

Now we have an opportunity to realize Barlow’s dreams, by investing in the right system. One that helps us wield new technologies instead of being wielded by them. We can choose to live in a city where the mind can explore freely and work in service of making life better for each other, knowing it makes life better for ourselves. That is the power of human culture at its best. An undeniable force—resilient to disruption, adaptive to great change, and resistant to coercion and conformity. We know how to do this. We’ve been doing it for millions of years.

It’s a civilization, if we want it.

Today, my recent TED talk—describing the massive media shift from the old, legacy world to Big Social’s chaos system and, ultimately, a “garden” with a new order—went up on YouTube. You can watch it above.

I can’t bring myself to watch this talk again. I watched it once a few days after delivering it, and all I could think of was how I could have done it better. It’s a complex task to pull off, especially under bright lights, with cameras on you, and on a fancy stage in front of an audience of smart people who have been watching a series of other top-flight speeches. It’s easy to mess it up.

I will say that I’m glad that I at least got my message across, and I didn’t clearly humiliate myself. I remembered everything I needed to say (most TED talks happen without notes), I didn’t stumble on my words too much, and I hit my main points. The weeks of practice paid off. But I wish I were more eloquent, more relaxed, more in-the-flow.

Still, I was extremely grateful for the opportunity and proud to represent Substack on that stage. And I was so glad to have another platform on which I could communicate a key message: that while we’re in a state of volatility in this time of cultural transition, there are better times ahead, where power will be distributed among the many instead of the few.

To go deeper with these ideas, I invite you to read the essay on which this talk was based, published in April on The Substack Post.

The Substack Post

From the temple to the garden

Update 5/22/25: This essay inspired Hamish’s TED talk, This is What the Future of Media Looks Like. Check it out on YouTube…

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a year ago · 5507 likes · 609 comments · Hamish McKenzie

The media world is in transition. The legacy model that supported media organizations for generations is in tatters. It will not recover. Some legacy organizations—including the New York Times and Bloomberg—have adapted to the new reality by investing more deeply in subscription revenues and becoming primarily digital-focused operations that can succeed independently of social media, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. The internet has fundamentally reordered the media landscape. Now is the time for the new.

The rise of new systems like traditional social media, and particularly Substack—which democratizes not only the power to publish and distribute, but also the power to build new media businesses—has obliterated the former advantages of legacy media organizations, and created new dynamics that favor an emerging class of independent voices and perspectives. As artificial intelligence gives these independents only more power, this is a trend that will neither reverse nor slow down.

Media organizations of the past, present, and future are wondering how to adapt to and build for this new reality. Here’s a simple heuristic: they should consider how they can support, rather than own, talent.

Under the old models, news organizations succeeded by aggregating talent under a specific masthead and then providing them financial security in exchange for control and ownership over the content they produced, and then claiming the majority share of the revenue resulting from that work. This model depended to a large extent on a certain number of “stars” in the organization delivering value that outstripped their compensation, effectively subsidizing the rest of the organization’s editorial operation.

The internet’s facilitation of independent media, however, has given such stars the ability to realize the full value of their work and claim it for themselves, creating a math problem for the media organizations operating on the old models.

But all is not lost for media organizations—especially those that have not yet been born. The most successful media organizations of the future will provide a structure that supports and invests in talent while sharing the financial rewards.

While the media organizations of the past built megalithic publications and channels that amassed large audiences thanks to distribution advantages (printing presses and delivery trucks; airwaves and radio frequencies), the media organizations of the future will foster constellations of more narrowly focused entities that dive deeper into niches and build trusted audiences around independent voices and perspectives. Rather than building the next CNN or New York Times, the media organizations of the future can build and support publications and channels that focus on specific locales, interest areas, trades, and personalities. They will nurture portfolios that include publications and channels that specialize in expert coverage of new world wines, English football, city halls, geopolitics, and voicey economics commentary.

In many cases, these more-focused entities will be at least partly owned by entrepreneurs who get some or most of the upside from the revenue that their entities generate, and who jointly or wholly own the content and the audience data. Many of these entrepreneurs will do at least some of the editorial work, and many will end up hiring staff to improve their autonomous publications and their areas of coverage. We are already seeing such activity within the Substack network. For example, Judd Legum found financial success with Popular Information before investing in a new reporter to run Musk Watch, a complementary publication. Hollywood business publisher The Ankler has invested in semi-autonomous publications including the Entertainment Strategy Guy and creator economy newsletter Like & Subscribe. Other publications such as The Free Press and Drop Site News demonstrate what’s possible when journalists become media entrepreneurs, building their own teams.

The larger media organizations will incentivize these entrepreneurs to be part of their network through providing services such as legal support, editing, supplementary content, marketing, sales, business playbooks, events infrastructure, and the ability to be part of a team that offers moral and professional support. In some cases, the media organizations will pay salaries and benefits such as health insurance. In return, they will claim a share of the revenue that the smaller media entities generate. In many cases, they will also get direct access to those audiences for cross-promotion, cross-selling, and marketing purposes. The media organizations will be able to claim the autonomous publishers within their network as part of their brand and accordingly benefit from the association.

The revenue opportunities that arise from these networks can be significant, encompassing direct subscriptions, advertising, events, content licensing, e-commerce, and bundling. By aggregating this revenue, the larger media organizations can then invest in further editorial work, funding investigative journalism, the hiring of more journalists, and strengthening the infrastructure that upholds journalistic standards and quality.

In a sense, such a network is not all that different from NewsCorp or Turner. The key differences can be seen in the scale of the autonomous publishing entities, and the ownership rights. The future is a multiverse of media businesses that range in scale from the micro to the macro, controlled by independent operators who can start with close to zero costs and grow on the strength of their direct relationships with their audiences. The Substack ecosystem, which continues to enrich many independent journalists and creators, reveals the mega trend. Media organizations can either watch while this trend overcomes them, or invest in it, and share in the benefits of a system that gives more power to independent publishers, creators, and entrepreneurs.

In this way, media organizations can think of themselves as similar to a platform like Substack itself. They can seek to uplift and support talent rather than own and control it, serving as facilitator rather than mediator. They will also continue to serve an important role as discoverer and developer of talent. They can tie their success to the talent’s success—and then help a billion flowers bloom. While this model can’t and won’t be the sole organizational option—it will likely live alongside publicly funded institutions, philanthropic projects, and other co-op models—it can play an important and large role in the overall media ecosystem.

My bet is that the resulting media ecosystem will be better, richer, and more valuable for a greater number of people and organizations than was previously possible. All the ingredients exist in the world for such a future to materialize: the infrastructure, the technology, the talent, and the demand. The thing that is currently in shortest supply is a base of entrepreneurs who are ready to start building this next generation of the media. Let’s hope that shortage won’t last for long.

Maybe you can help solve that?

Join me for my next live video in the app. And thanks to all who joined this conversation in real time, including , , , , and many others.

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You can read that post and dossier on Ken’s substack. But you can’t find it on X, Facebook, Threads, Instagram, or even Google Drive.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, is preventing access to Ken’s post because their policies “do not allow content from hacked sources or content leaked as part of a foreign government operation to influence US elections.”

X , meanwhile, blocked the link and banned Ken’s account, which had more than 500,000 followers, because an address for Vance was not redacted in the initial post. Ken has since redacted that information, but the ban stands.

What does Ken think of all this? Well, he thinks it’s all political.

In this conversation, we dive deeper into that question and what it all says about the current state of the media system.

Ahead of the big launch, I went live with to dive into some of the finer details of the Substack product, the genius of the Substack model, and why Clubhouse ultimately didn’t work.

Feel free to enjoy this, or disparage it as your mood may require.

Good culture is, in part, about recognizing and celebrating beauty. You can choose to see it, and, if you do, then you get to live a better life—a good life. This isn’t to deny that there is suffering, but it makes it so that the suffering can be in service of beauty, instead of collapsed into despair. 

What if the cultural systems we build, including the technology we use for sharing stories, can be tuned to grow beauty? Are the ones we have now working in that way? What would have to be true to have a world like that?

The best systems reward community-mindedness. People can grow by helping each other grow. People can win by building trust. People can support those who share beauty. There is still pain and suffering in such places, but the greater drive is to be in community with each other, to find communion, to transcend the commonplace, to search for the good, to try to live better lives. 

I turned 43 yesterday. I am discovering the challenges of middle age and sometimes wondering how I can get through them. It can be easy to get too deep on such problems. It can be easy to take your eyes off beauty. But it’s always there. My two sons holding hands. A family picnic in the Presidio. My parents looking at the fog on the Golden Gate Bridge. I just have to choose to see it. When I do, I’m always happier, and then I can be better for those around me. 

So many of the stories that we’re surrounded with today emphasize distress and loss. The systems we have built around those stories don’t discourage that focus and maybe even reward it. Those systems can stoke envy, magnify our differences, and pressure us to conform with in-group thinking. They’re not all bad, and they do create some wonders, but they’re more about laughing at each other than with each other. Raygun. Couches. Boom goes the dynamite.

One great thing about being a 43-year-old father is that I am now in prime position to support others. I hope that my contribution to this life will come from building structures and systems that help others grow beauty. We live on a planet that spins in space: a glowing, thinking, magical orb in a vast nothing. How amazing that we get to live on that, together. How vital it is that our stories show that truth.

I recently published a call to traditional media organizations to start thinking of Substack not as a threat but as a fellow traveler. I’ve been encouraged by the strong interest from publishers and media groups expressed since. On calls, I have found myself laying out ways that publishers can take advantage of Substack, and I thought it might be useful to share that thinking with a wider audience. 

Here are four win-win ways that traditional media can show up on Substack.

1. Full migration to Substack

Until earlier this year, U.S. politics commentary publication The Bulwark hosted its main site on WordPress and published a suite of podcasts and newsletters on Substack as its premium subscription bundle, resulting in millions of dollars in annual revenue. 

As it saw more and more evidence that the Substack network brought The Bulwark subscriptions, the company decided to move its whole publishing operation to the platform. The Substack network is anchored by discovery features such as Notes, Recommendations, search, and leaderboards. Today, it accounts for 30% of all paid subscriptions on the platform, and more than 50% of all subscriptions. 

“We decided to do this because we wanted to take advantage of Substack’s network,” The Bulwark’s audience development lead, Catherine Lowe, said at the time. “We saw that Substack was improving customization options and realized it wasn’t worth it to keep maintaining the other website.” 

For some news publications, it might not make sense to migrate full operations to Substack. There are some good reasons for publications to stick with their existing tech stack and systems—for example, Substack doesn’t support programmatic advertising. However, for others, and especially those for whom subscriptions matter much more than advertising, there might be great benefit in moving everything to Substack. 

Here’s why: 

• Substack’s publishing tools are simpler and in some cases more powerful than other solutions, which means publishers don’t need to invest in specialist operators or tech support to run their publications. Nor do they have to pay for those tools—Substack is free to use.

• Substack takes care of all customer support, so if a reader or subscriber writes in with a tech issue, the publisher doesn’t have to spend their time solving it. 

• There are tens of millions of readers in the Substack ecosystem, and millions with their credit cards in the system, which means they are one click away from being subscribed to any given publication. These potential subscribers tend to care deeply about good journalism and culture, and they have a proven propensity to pay. 

• Substack is a full-stack publishing system, accounting for publishing tools, distribution (to email, web, and the Substack app), subscriber management tools, community features (including comments and Chat), and discovery (through Notes, Recommendations, leaderboards, search, and more).   

Many fully fledged news outlets are already thriving on Substack, including The Free Press, Zeteo, The Ankler, Drop Site, The Pillar, The Mill, and Wonkette, to name a few. 

2. Start a new publication as a spin-off or independent experiment 

If a full migration to Substack isn’t in the offing, a simple way to experiment would be to start a completely new publication on the platform. Niche is good. For example, you could start a publication with one writer covering one subject area and see how it grows. It could be paid or free. For example, for the 2020 elections in the US, Vice started a pop-up substack about the US postal service. 

If the experiment is successful: great! Keep investing in it, and perhaps start more. There’s no limit to how many money-making substacks a single publisher may have. 

And if it doesn’t work out? Then there’s no great cost. One of the benefits of Substack is that it’s easy to try things out. It takes only a minute to set up and it’s free to use. The only way the company makes money is by taking a 10% cut of subscription revenue—so you only start paying when you start making money, and Substack only makes money when you do. Our incentives are aligned. 

3. Get your reporters on Substack

Every reporter should have a Substack account and should at the very least publish on Notes and probably have a newsletter, podcast, or video show, too. Most reporters are already active on social media anyway, building up their brands and their own audiences, and using platforms like X and Instagram to discuss their stories. But those platforms ultimately have control over their audiences and content—and they’re often not the best place for quality discourse. 

On Substack, everyone owns their relationships with their audiences (in the form of a mailing list) and all their content. As publishers build communities, those communities are theirs and not the platform’s. 

The quality of discourse is different, too. Substack hosts tens of millions of people who care deeply about journalism and culture and who seek out high-quality work and discussion. They’re not there for cheap hits and performative fights. 

News organizations could officially bless their reporters’ substacks, making sure they comply with house policies, and even negotiate for access to their audiences when mutually beneficial. This approach offers a clean reset from the “How much should we worry about what our reporters say on Twitter?” era. 

4. Let your reporters make money on Substack 

It’s a bold move, but some news organizations might see some benefit in allowing their reporters to run their own substacks and make money from subscriptions. Among other things, it presents cross-promotion and revenue-sharing opportunities. A reporter can use their expertise and reputation to serve a distinct audience through Substack and bring in income additional to their salary. The employer, which in many cases would have helped that reporter build their audience, could reasonably ask for a share of that revenue. The two parties could also promote each other’s products. For example, subscribers to the reporter’s substack could get a discount on a subscription to the news outlet, and vice versa. 

Some publishers may fear that by allowing their reporters to build up their own audience, and even make money, they might choose to leave their job and go independent. On the flip side, such an approach might also be seen as a retention strategy. Substack has been an option for years now, and it will simply be impossible to stop some reporters from feeling the lure of independence and the chance to make more money. Rather than try to prevent reporters from striking out on their own, news organizations could invest in those who have the ability and inclination to make money from their own audiences. 

With such an arrangement, new things become possible. Perhaps the reporter keeps writing full time for the news outlet but nurtures their own substack on the side. Perhaps the reporter will be happy to accept a lower salary in exchange for being able to dedicate more time to their substack. Perhaps the news outlet hires reporters who are specifically well suited to the Substack model and builds up a portfolio of publications that are independent from, but complementary to, its existing publications. There’s lots of room for experimentation here. And that’s just what the news industry needs. 

A final thought

Obviously, Substack will benefit as a business if traditional media organizations build compelling new products on the platform and bring in subscription revenue. I think that would be good for both Substack and the traditional media organizations. We can make money together. But there’s something more important at stake. 

The media ecosystem that we are all part of is heading in a concerning direction. Facebook and Instagram, two hugely important referrers of traffic, now downrank news and politics. X, formerly known as Twitter, punishes external links as it seeks to keep users perpetually in its feed. X has also diminished as a place of discourse since shifting focus away from conversation and toward the streaming of content. Meanwhile, the future of search is in question, with Google and others increasingly starting to favor AI summaries over links to news sites. The news industry needs an alternative. 

I think Substack, with traditional media’s help, can be that alternative. It’s a place where anyone can publish and distribute their work, engage in robust conversations around that work, build enduring businesses, control their brands, and retain ownership of their content and their relationships with their audiences. There are tens of millions of people active in this new media ecosystem today, and I see nothing in the laws of physics to stop it from getting to hundreds of millions, and then billions. This is a genuinely new opportunity for the media—a reset for the ecosystem. We should build it together. 

I’m working this week from Washington, D.C, where I come every so often for work reasons but also “my in-laws live here” reasons, and my temporary office is a hot desk situation in a coworking space that just happens to be on a lower floor in the Washington Post building. My position here, in the well-appointed dungeon of democracy’s most storied media organ (fizzy water on tap), has led me to reflect on the relationship that traditional media and Substack have with each other. 

When Substack came along, traditional media was still smarting from a decade of being both burnished and burned by social media. It’s not totally surprising that the traditional institutions would view us, another VC-funded Silicon Valley upstart stepping onto their turf, as a potential threat. But I hope that as time has passed it has become more clear that traditional media and Substack can happily coexist, and even help each other. I believe that we can grow together—and I haven’t seen much evidence to the contrary. 

A lot of people have come to Substack because they’re disappointed or disillusioned with traditional media and want different perspectives. I completely understand that and sometimes find myself in that frame of mind, especially in recent years. But I am, for better or worse, a traditional media tragic. 

Our media institutions have gone awry in many ways and many times, and they are struggling against business headwinds, but they remain committed to a set of values that are dear to my heart and important to society: quality writing, rigorous reporting, strong editing, deep research, dogged investigations, and coverage of unglamorous areas (they’re there when pipes burst and small-town mayors fall). Much of the anger that is directed at traditional media today concerns its coverage of politics and culture war issues, as if they are the only things on heaven and Earth worth dreaming about. That’s not to say the media institutions haven’t frequently failed us on those fronts, but so has pretty much everything (except, of course, for beautiful, perfect Substack). 

And so I have always been a bit sad about how traditional media has responded to the arrival of Substack, which has ranged from cheery optimism to measured skepticism to outright hostility. But it’s the behind-the-scenes stuff where I think there is most room for movement. Some news outlets have barred their reporters from having substacks, even if they are allowed to be on X. No traditional news organizations have set up Substack publications of their own. Sometimes, these outlets refuse to link to, or even name, Substack in their articles. 

I hope that the powers-that-be in traditional media take a fresh look at Substack. Yes, there are some areas of competition—a few of the best writers will prefer well-funded independence to a staff job; some people might ditch their newspaper subscription because of how much they’re paying to their favorite writers—but there are many more areas where we could all play so well together.

Take my building mates, the Washington Post, for example. They’re running an experiment where their Opinion section publishes pieces that were originally posted to Substack. The Post pays the writer a fee and then introduces their piece with a link to their Substack publication. The first two writers to be featured are Katelyn Jetelina and Magdalene Taylor. Thanks to this arrangement, the Post gets access to up-and-coming voices, fresh writing, and a friendly relationship with our company, which makes us more interested in doing what we can to help it succeed. (We’re already discussing new areas of cooperation.) At the same time, the writers get a bit of extra cash, a welcome association with a prestige news brand, and exposure to an audience they might not have already been reaching. It’s hard to find a downside. 

I also want to give plaudits to C-SPAN, which has just started a “Spotlight on Substack” series that profiles individual writers. This week, they featured Gabe Fleisher, who started a politics newsletter as a teenager and, now that he has graduated from university, is going full-time on Substack. This series is an acknowledgement that there are some exciting new voices in the media ecosystem and many of them are associated with a model that sets them aside from traditional media but elevates them above the dodgy incentives of the shouty social networks. 

 My friend Duncan Greive, who founded one of New Zealand’s top news and culture sites, The Spinoff, says Substack is now its top non-search traffic referrer other than Facebook. The Spinoff has several free Substack newsletters that it uses to send people to its top stories, but the platform has become a big traffic contributor generally. The quality of traffic is different, too, since Substack readers tend to be more sophisticated media consumers than those who graze Facebook. While The Spinoff has its own paid membership program that ostensibly competes for consumer dollars with Substack subscriptions, Duncan says on balance the investment in Substack more than pays off. “Being in an ecosystem which encourages sustainable growth, is designed for reading, and seems to have a bias toward considered thought is extremely positive.”

The way I see it, Substack is not traditional media’s enemy—it is an enlarger of the media ecosystem; a force that lets more voices in. 

I had an English teacher at university—wiry brown hair that sprouted from his scalp like a sea anemone’s tentacles; teeth like broken coral—who once wrote on the whiteboard: “God is love.” That’s irrelevant, though—I just remember it really well. He also said something that I don’t quite remember verbatim but has stuck with me for 24 years. It was something like: “The only pleasure almost as great as enjoying art is talking about art.” (Did someone famous say something like this? Leave it in the comments!) I think of this statement a lot when considering the current state of the media landscape. 

For the last decade or so, we’ve had a fractured system made up of traditional media (newspapers, magazines, news sites, blogs, TV news, radio, etc) and social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc). Traditional media has long made stuff that social media then talks about. In that sense, it has been a symbiotic relationship. Traditional media provides the fodder for social media’s main draw, while social media sends traffic to traditional media. The only problem is that the art and the talking about art has been happening in different places, and each place settled on advertising as its main way of making money. That has been bad news for traditional media, because social media is the most efficient vehicle for advertising the gods have ever created. As a result, even though these two institutions have historically been codependent, the success of social media has come at traditional media’s expense. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way with Substack, where art can be created and talked about in the same place. Traditional media and Substack’s models are largely complementary. In fact, media institutions can build completely on Substack and thrive while still owning their audience, brand, and content, as is being demonstrated by The Free Press, The Ankler, The Bulwark, The Pillar, The Mill, and numerous other operations that would otherwise be considered traditional media. 

Even if their core properties exist outside Substack, though, news institutions can grow audiences on Substack, publish casual content to Notes, and experiment with community-building. Perhaps they could encourage their writers to have their own (officially sanctioned) substacks, where the writer’s voice can shine and they can build audiences that can then be directed to the parent outlet’s stories or events. This would be good for the publishers, who could reach new audiences in new ways, and good for the writers, who could be part of the discourse around their stories without being so vulnerable to the flame wars that characterize some of the other social networks. It’s also good for Substack, since our company and platform would benefit from having more great writers contributing to discussion on Notes and helping attract more readers, listeners, and viewers who might then go on to support other publishers in the ecosystem. I might even venture to argue that society would benefit from the rise of a platform for discourse that serves as an alternative to the networks that have, over the years, undermined the appetite for longform content and consumers’ willingness to pay for good reporting. 

The traditional media business is in a spot of trouble, but that doesn’t mean it’s doomed. People still want great reporting, and there are more people than ever who can produce it. What’s broken is the business model. Now is a time for experiments. Now is a time for creative thinking. Now is a time to invert some pyramids. 

If anyone in traditional media wants to talk: my inbox is wide open.

Last week, we hosted a party in Washington D.C. at the same time as the White House Correspondents Dinner. A fascinating array of people from across the political spectrum came to the black tie event at The Willard Hotel, including Marianne Williamson, Meghan McCain, Jessica Reed Kraus, Matt Taibbi, Sally Bedell-Smith, Joaquin Castro, David Hogg, and many other journalists, writers, social media influencers, and others who I am almost definitely remiss not to mention. We had originally planned to book a couple of tables at the Correspondents dinner and fill them with rowdy Substackers, but they politely declined our application. No matter. Our party was more fun. 

Halfway through the event, I took the mic to give a few remarks. I thought it might be nice to share the speech here.

So here it is.

Hi everyone, my name is Hamish McKenzie, I’m a former journalist and author and I’m one of the founders of Substack. I’m so grateful that you’re all here tonight. A special thanks to Catherine Valentine, our head of politics, who is responsible for pulling this all together. 

Our original plan was to pay for a couple tables at the White House Correspondents Dinner and populate them with Substackers, but they turned us away. It’s just as well, because this is better. I’d rather be in this room with you than in one with President Biden and Colin Jost. 

We’re calling this the “New Media” party, but Substack is not just new media. It’s new voices, a new economy, new angles, new freedom, new courage. It’s a new option when the other options are increasingly disappearing or disappointing.  

Substack is not Democrat or Republican. It’s pan-political… 

For those on the left, Substack is a way to seize the means of production, to cut out the middle man, and to give workers the ownership. Power to the people!

For those on the right, Substack is a monument to the free market. It’s capitalism distilled. And it’s the greatest libertarian media system ever made. Let the best minds win!

And for the authoritarians and anyone who would shut down the voice of the independent, the voice of the dissident, the voice of the common man, the voice of the oppressed…

Substack is a big fuck you. 

Many of the people in this room tonight are Substack writers. Everyone else, I’d bet, is a Substack reader. And if you don’t know what Substack is at all—please stop helping yourself to the free drinks. 

Tonight, I salute each and every one of you, because you’re helping to build something new, something better, and you’re helping everyone take back their mind. 

This is a big year. In six and a half months, there’ll be an election. So much of it will involve the same old characters. But we’ll be there together, as Substack, offering something new.

So here’s a toast to everyone in this room. Thank you for being here with us tonight, it’s our immense privilege. I hope everyone has a great time. 

Every few months, I get to spend some time in New York, and I use it to meet with as many writers as I can. I cajole them over beers to start a substack. I ask them over lunch how I can make their lives better. Sometimes, I just want to hang out with them because I like their work. 

I’ve just finished one such 27-hour visit, and as ever it was a fever of meetings, meals, and booze. I’ve come away energized, as I always do, but this time it felt a little heavier than usual. I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps it’s my stage of life, or that there are some things going on at work that have been weighing on me, or maybe it was the contents of the conversations. But I find this work so meaningful. Professionally, at least, there is nothing more important to me than to feel I am helping writers. 

In Bryant Park, a writer who has been on Substack since the earliest days confessed that he is struggling. He has a day job that is bringing stresses, a young child with a challenging health situation, and some problems with his substack that he just hasn’t been able to solve. He was at his wit’s end. He might shut his publication down. Could we help? Is there anything we can do to make his life simpler, to help him breathe again? We went for a walk. He clasped both hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye. “I’m sorry man, I keep bringing you all my problems.” I took him to the office and introduced him to a team member who recently joined to help writers navigate tricky tech issues.  

At dinner in Soho, seated with a colleague and four writers around a round table in a noisy Italian restaurant, a writer unloaded a litany of complaints stemming from her recent frustrations with Substack. We didn’t respond well enough after a big problem that was partially our fault. We had given other writers a lot of support but not her. We were messing things up by prioritizing followers over subscribers. There are competitors now that are almost as good as Substack and don’t charge 10% of subscription revenue, she said. They’re getting more and more tempting. She expected more from us. I tried to hold my agitation in. For years, I have seen the positive impact Substack has had on this writer’s life, and we have always tried to give her first-class treatment. I’m not sure my attempts at suppression succeeded. I told her that if she’s unhappy with Substack, she can move to a different platform. We designed Substack so that you own and control your mailing list, content, and even payments relationships—and you can leave and take them with you at any time. We have set everything up so that we can win only if writers win. We didn’t start the company in 2017 because we were greedy capitalists. Writers weren’t exactly the most lucrative customer base at that time. We did it because we wanted to help writers and give them more power. Things don’t always go well. We’re a startup trying to bring a new system into the world at the same time as trying to make a good company at the same time as trying to balance the interests of thousands of publishers who have different needs and opinions and joys and criticisms. If she feels that we have let her down, then we have. We will try to make it right. At the end of the night, we hugged and she said: “Sorry for roasting you in front of everyone.”

Over matcha and coffee at 8.30am at an Irving Farm in NoMad, a writer who has built huge followings on social media told me that he supported Substack’s hands off approach to content moderation. He had been suspended and demonetized by Facebook multiple times for referencing his political opponents’ posts so he could criticize them. The bans always came at the hands of an AI that flagged content based on key words or specific language, regardless of context. It would sometimes take weeks to get a human’s attention to have the ban reversed. In the meantime, he’d lose the ability to reach his audience and make money. He was grateful that he doesn’t have to worry about that at Substack, not only because we don’t do heavy-handed moderation, but also because he gets paid directly by his subscribers, all of whom are on a mailing list that he controls. “I haven’t heard anyone talk about the content moderation issue from that angle,” he said. He wants to keep growing on Substack and asked for advice. I said he should look at Notes as an opportunity. It’s still in its early days, but Notes is already directly driving revenue growth for writers—in some cases, a note has driven thousands of dollars in paid subscriptions. 

Ninety minutes later in our office, over a wide table in a conference room, I talked to a rising star whose newsletter has become a cult favorite in New York. “I’m thinking of ways to expand to other platforms,” she said. “I see writers who have built big audiences on social media and then brought them to Substack and they have all these other revenue streams.” Most of her growth has come directly from the Substack network, so she’s interested to see how she can move outwards. Should she bring on contributors? Should she start a podcast? When should she try get some press coverage? I said she could consider doing more free posts—and make them her best work—as a way to find new readers and convince existing readers to become paid subscribers. A strong free post by a writer of her calibre and reach can drive tens of thousands of dollars of subscriptions. That has always been one of my favorite things about Substack: a writer can get a huge pay rise by publishing a great story. 

I went for a walk around Koreatown with a colleague who recently joined to help make our writer events awesome. So much stuff coming up. We’ll be hosting a night of readings led by a young essayist in some ornate church, and, because of some scheduling snafu the church had agreed to let us serve food and drinks in the sanctuary. There’ll be an intimate salon in an apartment in New York’s famed Dakota apartment building, where John Lennon was shot. We’d just decided to do a small event around live hate reads. A popular Substack writer will host a live game show based on pop culture trivia in a theater. 

Over lunch in a too-fancy restaurant that had trees growing inside it, I tried to convince a couple of writers, who had found refuge and security and ultimately better pay in Substack after losing their digital media jobs, that they should bring their large, ad-supported podcast into Substack so that it can sit alongside their other work and they can have a direct relationship with those listeners. “We quite like the idea of having a different type of revenue stream as a hedge, just in case,” one of them said. Understandable, I said, but I reckoned that the subscription revenue they would ultimately generate from bringing those listeners into their Substack community would quickly surpass their share of the ad dollars that they get from their podcast network. They’ve got so much growth ahead. I offered to hook them up with an agency that could help with them production and maybe even sell host-read ads for them. 

I enjoyed the crispy skinned salmon.

I’m on a train now, heading back to Washington DC, where my wife and I have brought our kids for spring break. I am tired. I am satisfied. This work is sometimes taxing on the heart, but it is good for the soul. I can’t wait to get back to New York.