Four ways traditional media can work with Substack

Together, we can reset the media ecosystem

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 

Anne Helen Petersen left BuzzFeed to start Culture Study on Substack. What if BuzzFeed had invested in Culture Study instead of letting her go?

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.