When I started trying to get into journalism in the early 2010s, the old newspaper business model was in terminal crisis. Whole newsrooms were being laid off. Thousands of newspapers across the country were folding or going online-only. A new crop of digital magazines had risen to take their place, but most of them were nakedly clickbaity—as BuzzFeed proudly proclaimed in its title. They also seemed to operate at the whims of oligarchs: Arianna Huffington had become, for no clear reason, a leading figure in the industry. It would also soon become obvious that these outlets relied heavily on the mercy of social-media algorithms. In the mid-2010s, Facebook changed its algorithm to de-emphasize news, eventually spelling doom for BuzzFeed and its ilk.
These days, I do a regular roundup of news sources. I have a long list of newspapers and journals, and it seems to grow constantly to the point where I get dizzy. Virtually every time I do my roundup, I find myself discovering new, professional, well-produced digital magazines that I had never heard of before. And that’s alongside an outpouring of individual voices suddenly able to find audiences online. It’s an embarrassment of riches—a writing renaissance—and we should be celebrating it.
The question is why we don’t. My answer is that the way content is produced has dramatically changed, but the way it is evaluated hasn’t.
If you close your eyes and think about journalism, what comes to mind is likely a newspaper, stitched together in a sweaty, shouty newsroom and dispatched to a printer. What you think of may well be The New York Times, which, despite the challenges facing the legacy media, has continued to thrive, with sections touching just about every topic imaginable. If you think about magazines, you are still likely to think of The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, The New Yorker—all battleships that have been around for a century or in some cases close to two and have maintained a reputation for a certain refinement in style and approach. If you think about publishing or literature, you are likely to think about Simon & Schuster and the other great ampersanded houses with their storied pedigrees that live slightly upstream of the literary prizes that do so much to sort through the year’s slush of published work.
These institutions have with good reason become synonymous with American high culture, and they have nimbly navigated the treacherous transition to the digital era. But today, they represent a very narrow portal to what’s out there. They all have their origins in the cultural ecosystem that emerged out of the printing press. Because they are built around the physical limitations inherent to the printed form of their products, their selling point is the radical reduction of material. A publishing company sorts through acres and acres of “slush” in order to find the nuggets of gold that are worth valorizing; those, from the moment they are in print, enter into a zero-sum battle to make it to end-of-year lists or to win a handful of century-old awards. Likewise, out of all the people offering up their opinions, The New York Times selects a couple dozen to be the official commentariat in its op-ed pages.
The basic premise at the core of these institutional practices is that the activity in question is somewhat rare: that there aren’t that many good books, that there isn’t that much news, that not many people are genuinely qualified to dispense their opinions, and that the modes of transmission (printing, binding, distributing) are logistically challenging enough to place natural limits on the amount of content produced. But in the digital age, none of this still holds.
The main value that newspapers and publishing companies used to offer was the ability to make and distribute copies of text. Now, websites and platforms instantly generate, in effect, infinite copies, in the sense that anyone from anywhere can access them. For several decades, digital content production lagged behind traditional publications in several regards. The blogosphere was clunky and unattractive and had no reliable means to generate revenue. The buzzy new-media publications that emerged in the 2010s rode in on the back of social media and had a vested interest in dumbing down and in giving advertisers the clickbait they wanted. But that’s been changing. There has been an outpouring of low-cost, high-quality publications run by credentialed professionals that stake out digital space outside of legacy media. And there is Substack, to which a considerable number of legacy-media veterans have partially or fully decamped.
There are, according to the company, 35 million active Substack subscriptions, including 3 million paid ones, across thousands upon thousands of newsletters. If there had always been a certain stench of failure in the self-publishing world and on writing platforms like Medium and WordPress, Substack seemed to overcome that, first, by offering generous pay to prominent writers in the early going and then generating a coattails effect. There isn’t much stench of failure on a platform that is home to scribes like Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, Patti Smith, Roxane Gay, Nick Hornby, Nate Silver, among many others.
So how have these remarkable developments been covered by the legacy media? Basically not at all.
In 2021, The New York Times published an article headlined “Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack,” and then another asking whether “the rise of the Substack economy [is] bad for democracy.” Then the freakout subsided until late 2023, when The Atlantic’s Jonathan M. Katz contended that “just beneath the surface the platform has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism.” It turned out that the questionable content amounted to six newsletters with small subscriber bases. That was enough for The Atlantic to try to do a victory dance on Substack’s grave. “Substack Was a Ticking Time Bomb,” the magazine’s follow-up piece declared, concluding that the “shift from an amorphous, uncategorizable service provider to a no-question-about-it social-media company may have sealed Substack’s fate.” The New York Times jumped in with the headline, “Substack Says It Will Not Ban Nazis or Extremist Speech.”
The pseudo-controversy over extremism on the platform obscured the fraught dynamics between Substack and legacy media. Basically, Substack existed in a much more harmonious and organic relationship to the internet than did legacy media. The controls were off, the editorial oversight was removed, and that allowed writers to produce a staggering quantity of content—much of it rubbish, of course, but a lot of it really good. The legacy media preferred to either ignore it or defame it. And since the legacy outlets still largely held onto its position as the evaluator of content (there are, for instance, awards for published books but not awards for Substacks), the culture at large has found it easy to miss the scale and importance of what has been happening.
“None of these dynamics is exactly novel.”
None of these dynamics is exactly novel. Similar shifts—a massive increase in the volume of output, a proliferation of channels, a weakening of the power of traditional gatekeepers—occurred with the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, with broadsheets in the 18th century and penny presses in the 1830s. In every case, they led to a profound change in the history of journalism and of literature—in the long run, for the better. A parallel change is clearly taking place online—but only for those who are willing to believe in the democratizing potential of the new technology and to follow where it leads. Traditional media, on the other hand, would prefer to close their eyes.