![]() “I’m very not big into writing in a vacuum, and I think that is the thing I miss the most.” Kelsey McKinney, a journalist whose literary Substack, Written Out, has accounted for about a third of her income during the pandemic, doesn’t do any reporting for her newsletter because of the lack of legal and editorial backing. “I just know how valuable it is to have a second ear to bounce ideas off of, someone to challenge you,” she said. “It’s a lot.” Harvin, the Beauty IRL writer, said she missed the infrastructure-legal and editorial-of a traditional outlet. “Holy shit, I work anywhere from fifty to sixty hours a week,” Atkin, of Heated, told me. And that is the paradox of Substack: it’s a way out of a newsroom-and the racism or harassment or vulture-venture capitalism one encountered there-but it’s all the way out, on one’s own. Writing is often considered an individualistic enterprise, but journalism is a collective endeavor. First, though, there’s this legitimate criticism of the Substack model: TAC has been and continues to be a great place to work.Īnyway, Columbia Journalism Review has a new piece out more or less blasting the Substack model for undermining the media model and - no kidding - perpetuating racism. I want to emphasize, though, that unlike Sullivan, I did not start my Substack because people at my magazine were trying to censor me. But I’m finding that certain readers appreciate the more conversational, less combative tone and content of Daily Dreher. If you come here for hot takes alone, you might not like Daily Dreher. Check out Daily Dreher to see what you think. To repeat: on this TAC blog, I write a lot about the culture war, politics, and so forth, but on the Substack I step a bit back from the heatedness of these topics. But I’m putting a lot into it after I finish my day’s work here at TAC, so I’m going to start charging before long, because I need to replace my sidestream of speaking income lost to Covid. For now, I’m sending it out for free, and have about 3,400 subscribers. I wanted a place for my less polemical and more reflective writing. I started a Substack about three weeks ago, to do a different kind of writing from what you see on this blog. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi went Substack, and the other day, so did Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias. Andrew Sullivan, angry that New York magazine wouldn’t let him write critically of the Black Lives Matter protests and race riots, jumped to Substack and has tripled or quadrupled his income. Former National Review writers Jonah Goldberg and David French, among others, are doing very well with The Dispatch, their political newsletter (which is now the No. Usually these subscribers pay some amount (the least you can charge is five dollars per month) for exclusive access to the content. Substack is a platform for writers to publish newsletters that go out to subscribers. You will by now have heard that a number of marquee writers are moving over to the Substack model.
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