by There are still opportunities at the top. Take the New York Times, for example. It faces real headwinds (revenue from print subscriptions is falling here, as in many places), but access to a global audience has opened up prospects for growth. The Times can be as competitive in California as it is in New York and can make a real race also at an international level. But a global market creates a winner-take-most dynamic. Most people will subscribe to only one news outlet, if at all. And they will choose the subscription that offers the greatest value. The more subscribers the market leader gains, the more money and reach it will have to attract the best staff and expand its offering. The more talent you hire and products you offer (Cooking! Games! Product Reviews! Local sports!), the best deal is, which makes the package much more attractive, and the wheel still works.
On the other hand, it’s easier than ever to support yourself as a freelance author. I dedicated myself to journalism as a blogger when there was no way to make money. What you did then was move your blog to an established media outlet with some kind of business model and get paid for it. I went to The American Prospect and then The Washington Post, and that was the beginning of my career.
But now those blogs are newsletters and those newsletters have subscribers. In my opinion, Substack’s main innovation was realizing that you could charge a lot more for a single author newsletter subscription than most of us imagined. It would never have occurred to me to sell subscriptions to my blog for $80 a year. But if you sell them for $80 a year, you can make a living with 5,000 subscribers. A small, well-monetized audience is a perfectly good source of income.
But that revenue stream does not increase to finance a publication that requires supporting multiple reporters, editors, copy editors, photo editors, etc. There’s a reason opinions thrive on Substack and investigative journalism doesn’t. Some publications, like Politico and Axios, have built actual newsrooms on top of newsletters, but you need a deep-pocketed audience for that to work.
That’s where the media is right now: you can thrive by being very small or very large, but it’s extremely difficult to even survive between those poles. That’s a disaster for journalism… and for readers. The medium can be more niche, weird, and experimental than mass publishing, and it can be more ambitious, informed, and thoughtful than smaller players. In the middle is where many great journalists are found and trained. The middle is where local reporting is done and where culture is created rather than discovered.
