Traditional media and Substack can grow together

Thoughts on building a better media ecosystem

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.