Can Substack Save Journalism?
Skepticism from the perspective of ethical and epistemological design
This piece was originally commissioned for an online magazine but got killed so I’m posting it here:
I used to live in a small city in upstate New York that had unusually contentious school board elections. One candidate knocked on my door and started ranting for thirty minutes about how she was the target of a local conspiracy to tarnish her family’s reputation. Her husband had sat on the school board for a term and was voted out.
My wife taught in the local high school, and I asked what the deal was with these school board elections. She mentioned that she heard that food supplier contracts, custodial jobs, even after-school programming contracts were given to family members of the school board. As people cycled in and out of the board, the school went through five principles in four years, the board sued to terminate the district superintendent, who then turned around and implicated board members in misallocation of school funds. Every four years or so the board either sued, or was sued, by some former employee of the district. The district and the teacher’s union went for six years without a renegotiated contract. I kept thinking about all of these rumors about board corruption, how none of it was covered in the local press. When lawsuits were filed suddenly there could be access to court documents from anywhere in the world, and some underpaid freelancer thousands of miles away could then summarize the case from those documents and the story would appear as local news in the local paper website. This is a pattern known to all observers of media whereby about a decade ago conglomerates would buy out hundreds of local papers, lay off all the reporters, outsource the writing to freelancers who would just put out Google alerts on documents released from city hall meetings, court filings, and blog posts, and then write summaries for websites which would then count as local news.
In another era, a person on the local politics beat would get a tip on a public corruption story, show up at the school asking to look at the supplier contracts, and interview a few people to figure out if the suppliers were related to school board members. Rumors of this kind of corruption happening all over small town America might lead to hundreds of little stories like this, culminating in some enterprising national reporter on the education beat doing an investigation of how widespread small town school board corruption is, what effect it has on school budgets and allocation of state funds to schools, and whether this is more prevalent in rural or urban school districts. Ongoing local investigations of this kind over time would provide the data for an academic researcher who can plot whether corruption is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same over time in America, what interventions seemed to fix it and what patterns of response seem to exacerbate it. Downstream from all this work, there might be a very good commentator on the internet who cites facts about school board corruption as one amongst many pieces of evidence for some political or policy intervention, maybe even serve as a weapon in the ongoing culture war that gets hundreds of thousands more clicks than any story of local school board corruption.
Instead, local reporting has been outsourced to rumor mills and gossip apps like Nextdoor and Neighbors, with the only official sourcing of facts coming from publicly available documents issued from the government or corporate press releases. Exclusive reliance on sources of this kind skews the facts, to say the least. The same happens when national or international newsrooms layoff a third or half of its reporting workforce. Chris Mooney shows data here that newspaper jobs shrank from over 400,000 at the turn of the century, to about 78,000 today. Questions and answers that serve as important data points for downstream analysis simply vanish. Front-line reporting is where all the little facts from the small corners of the observable world are supposed to come from, facts which serve as evidence and material for analysis and commentary. Every culture war figure or political pundit depends on such reporting, as much as any ordinary citizen who simply wants to be informed. We need the stories first before we know whether they are outliers or endemic, before they are representation of trends or fleeting moments of entertainment.
With the decimation of journalism, what people have called “legacy” journalism like the LA Times, Washington Post, network news, and at this point we might even include millennial publications that are hardly legacy, like Vice, Buzzfeed news, and so forth, one question often raised is whether places like Substack or Reels, Youtube, or the content-creator economy can or should pick up the slack. I wrote a note recently on Substack expressing skepticism, to which I faced either responses like “duh” or strong pushback. My view is that the quality of Substack newsletters, or Reels, or other content creator platforms generating subscription revenue to individual creators, is downstream from good journalism, not a replacement for it.
Good journalism, like good academic research, is about uncovering the previously unknown, and uncovering it in the places where you might not antecedently know that the information is valuable. How do you price the value of knowing about school board corruption in small-town USA, or about the emergence of dissident networks in Nepal, before you know whether any of it exists? If a piece of information is valuable for a hedge fund to find out, information that moves markets, they will pay handsomely for their fact-finders to go out and find out, and report back to the hedge fund. But even for hedge funds, you do not know ahead of time the value of all unknown things. It was impossible for anyone to know the value of gila monster saliva research in the 1990s and how it would eventually turn into an $80 billion dollar industry of GLP-1 drugs decades later. Journalism is to the pundits, think tanks, podcasters, and Substackers what basic scientific research is to the development of monetizable technology and pharmaceuticals. You need a wide net covering as many corners of the unknown as possible, including much of the unknown that you do not know to be valuable.
Can this kind of good journalism exist, and exist in a sustainable way, on a platform like Substack? It is not impossible. Some of it exists already. Critics of my notes point out that a lot of good frontline reporting from Ukraine is happening her on Substack, and similarly for Gaza. In some kinds of reporting, Substack’s independence exceeds the stifling qualities of legacy reporting. But there would need to be very big changes for Substack to match the advantages that legacy-type newsroom have in other areas. In the front-line practice of reporting, legacy-type newsroom have a big advantage to Substack. Here is a list of just some of the structural advantages.
(A) Reporting admits of a set of ethical constraints that good organizations sign on to, and journalist who work for them must adhere to, such that when they violate them, they are required to retract or apologize or are fired as a result. These include journalistic ethics like:
1. Have two independent sources before stating that an event happened (as opposed to stating that so-and-so said that it happened.)
2. Independent fact-checking statements for accuracy.
3. Do not reveal off-the-record sources, and do not report off-the-record statements.
4. Do not pay sources or tipsters for information.
5. Disclose gifts from sources or other conflicts of interest (like former employers, or married to/related to sources.
6. Give subjects of critical coverage a meaningful opportunity to respond.
7. Do not bury relevant information unfavorable to sources in the story.
8. Do not plagiarize.
Can Substackers sign onto these same sets of ethical constraints? Absolutely. Is there an easy way to hold Substackers accountable to them, such that there is easy oversight and proportionate punishment? Any ethical code that relies on the honor system, like journalistic ethics does, requires heavy front-end, voluntary self-policing in professional communities of honor and reputation. Newsrooms provide editorial oversight on every story, and controversial stories receive extra-careful, perhaps even too-careful auditing on the front end. Newsrooms do not always get this right, even with such oversight. On the other hand, how much faith should we put in absolute zero-oversight on the front-end of news-production, and make it all happen on the back-end, from readers and crowd-sourcing and subscription-cancellation? Is there going to be a Substack-newsletter auditor, and how many newsletters can such a person reasonably oversee? The deck is stacked against Substack simply from the institutional design.
(B) Reporting against powerful individuals and institutions often require FOIA (freedom of information) requests, legal review, and are subject to legal threats and require legal counsel and protection. There is nothing more litigious than a powerful institution or person who does not like a story coming out about them. Newsrooms with pooled resources, like subscription or advertising revenue, can have in-house counsel dedicated to applying pressure to governments who fail to abide by FOIA law by stonewalling or dragging their feet. In-house legal counsel can manage threats at fixed cost to the organization, and provide review at wholesale rather than retail rates, even for journalists working on stories that might not be of significant national interest. Can Substackers with thousands of individuals doing individualized reporting at audience numbers spanning from hundreds to hundreds of thousands manage to report on the powerful in the face of such legal pressure and in need of legal protection? On this I am most skeptical, knowing how economies of scale work. How much will Substackers persist in reporting that butts up against the lawyers at an app company that workers are claiming are stealing their wages? Will only successful Substackers be able to afford legal counsel? Will they be willing to pay into a fund to subsidize smaller-audience reporters, even those reporting on things they don’t particularly like?
(C) Newsrooms with their pooled resources and pooled risk offer an environment where no individual story, individual reporter, or individual beat requires monetization for the entire ecosystem to work in a way that those stories and beats can exist. Substack works in the opposite way. Individual reporters or newsletters or beats need to obtain a certain level of monetization or they will disappear in the Substack marketplace. This is not a way to incentivize reporting on unknown areas of public interest, any more than the pharmaceutical industry is incentivized to engage in basic scientific research that poses a high risk of not being monetizable. Instead, such an industry chases already market-tested variations on already popular content or drugs. Only if an individual celebrity writer decides to cast their net wide enough on enough beats can enough unknown corners of the world be uncovered. But the individualized market for information is biased toward monetizable information, which is not the same thing as important information. Unmonetizable information may have significant political, cultural, or impact for people who do not have much money to buy such information. Today’s unmonetizable information may be tomorrow’s monetizable information.
(D) One of the biggest and well-known problems that individualized monetization faces in journalism is audience-capture. Substack is supposed to free journalists from the stifling constraints of institutional-capture, the idea that the editors or owners of the Washington Post or the New York Times or the Star-Tribute need their journalists to stay in line with the specific idiosyncratic agendas and constraints of particular newsrooms. Substack does do this, but it does not entail that that journalists are free from all forms of capture. In the age of subscription monetization, we’re not talking about dependence or independence, but a trade-off between two forms of dependence. You can have dependence for your livelihood on a subscriber base for you as an individual writer or reporter, or dependence on editorial permission from an organization funded by a larger subscriber base, or billionaire owner, or government subsidies, or an endowment. Both are forms of dependence, and generate their own forms of bias. Evidence from this era of journalism as well as centuries of journalism going back to the printing press suggests that subscriber/reader-driven funding generates far more partisan and polarizing media. Subscribers/readers are far more disposed to cancel, organize boycotts, or create other forms of flak when a publication displeases them than Mercedes, McDonald’s, or Ford are disposed to cancel advertising when reporting pisses them off, so long as the eyeballs are still on the news stories. Substack metrics capture growth, engagement, and subscription-conversion at the individual-writer level, with A/B testing capability that reward conforming content to those metrics. This is not true independence, simply a different kind of dependence. I think everyone can point to plenty of Substack writers they think happen to be heavily audience-captured, using the same criteria we use as evidence than certain legacy writers are institutionally-captured. This is not to say that Substack isn’t better than legacy publications on many dimensions or measures of independence. Perhaps Substack is on net better than the bureaucratic inertia and editorial gatekeeping plaguing newsrooms. But what newsroom have at least is resource-pooling and the kind of independence that brings. Whether newsrooms exercise that kind of independence well or poorly is a matter of good or bad decision-making at the editorial level. Independence is a matter of discretion. Substack writers are beholden to individualized monetization metrics
None of (A)-(D) are insurmountable obstacles, but simply reason for skepticism that Substack can replace the kind of reporting of public interest that newsrooms provide (albeit imperfectly). Everyone knows the business problems that journalism faces, and the trust problems that legacy journalism faces. It does not look like advertising will pay the bills ever again, and it looks like only a few publications will end up receiving subscription-levels that support a modicum of journalistic independence. In the space downstream from reporting, i.e., thinking and commentary about what is reported, there is nothing legacy and quasi-legacy outlets provide that Substack does not. But front-line reporting has become like a lot of things of significant public importance that has failed market-based financing. Other examples include basic scientific research, rare-disease research, prison to society reintegration programs, cultural heritage like classical music, endangered languages and cultures, or environmental disaster cleanup. All of these things are of significant public value, but do not admit of market-based financing. It is a very optimistic opinion, contrary to a lot of evidence, to think that individual, crowd-funded subscription-based financing will fill the void for news reporting any more than it has filled the void for these other public goods.
Barry Lam is Professor of Philosophy at UC Riverside, and Host and Producer of Slate’s Hi-Phi Nation podcast, a show where philosophy and reality meet . He writes about discretionary decision-making in his book Fewer Rules, Better People published by Norton.