I have been thinking today about Whitman’s noiseless patient spider, how writers also want their words to catch hold somewhere, to anchor into someone.
Excellent piece, Josh, making multiple important points, including that main one in the title. I'll extend and examine a couple.
Your thesis touches on Stubstack's questionable stance regarding its own nature and role. The constant promotion of its success stories and of Substacks devoted to training for Substack success makes sense as a business matter. They're here to make money and survive; otherwise, all the good things for writers disappear. But such a perspective fails to acknowledge (Substack obviously knows of) the array of different kinds of Substackers.: the old pro, longtime successes vs the newbies. The creative writers vs the journalists, the blogger-newsletter writers vs the artists, the avocationists vs the vocationists. On Substack, everyone is called a "writer" (don't get me started on "creative"), but these are all different roles, with different natures, needs, and responsibilities.
Substack ignores this, to the misleading detriment of many. Back when the great Nazi debate took place, Substack took the position and many were misled in their thinking to believe that Substack is a provider of publishing *tools* and not a publisher, and thus individual Substack writers are also publishers. They are not. They don't control the publication platform, however much Substack promotes the notion of creative control by individual writers. Whatever editorial control Substack does or does not exercise (regarding for instance, Nazis), it is free, as a privately owned business, to exercise whatever editorial control it wishes. Editorial controls not exercised are an editorial position too. They can be massaged in the corporate consciousness into a claim that publishing Nazi-sympathetic, racist, and voices subversive of democracy is a principled stand rather than a profit-seeking principle.
Thus, while I of course agree with you about all the benefits of multi-level editorial review and control in ideally producing more rigorous journalism and preventing the negative examples of newspreneurship you cite, just like Substack, the New York Times can develop a corporately interested perspective that degrades its standards. The public sphere is by this time overflowing with the execrably pusillanimous Times headlines and phraseology of recent years. Today, we get Elon Musk's "aggressive incursion" into government operations rather than "coup." Is it possible that a corporate mindset, editorially executed and enforced across multiple reviews is at work? And what is that mindset? That the times does not wish to be perceived as "partisan" because it doesn't want its subscriber base to diminish?
Excellent points, Jay, about how the Times itself has been compromised.
The fact that none of this can be explained easily to a first-year college student is unacceptable.
You are also right on in explaining how a universal "writer" label confuses things. The word some people are using for media now is "information ecosystems," which is even sadder since that term originated in library science as a way of explaining reputable systems built by experts for the sake of good faith research.
Thanks for writing, Joshua. We’re definitely struggling to maintain a common knowledge, instead of splintered realities. We need strong and responsible news sources that serve the entirety of their local communities, not a partisan agenda.
I would frame it more as the decline of the old news business model weakening the system. Whether or not a given for-profit owner was too aggressive in harvesting revenue, the sector struggled to maintain any growth. The NYT wobbled but ultimately crossed the bridge thanks to its international footprint and smart diversification enabling its pivot to a heavier subscriber model. Trust erosion has come thanks to legacy media no longer serving its audience but also because the digital roar now defines true modern media more than anything carefully curated by editors.
A smart take -- thank you. I remain mystified by how first-year students can be taught information literacy in this climate. Other smart people, like my friend Sam Kahn, see this as just inevitable and think that one either goes with the flow or they don't. Do you think the SMELL test still applies, or must a new one be written for the digital roar?
The SMELL test principles are pretty sound, even today. Maybe the problem is sheer volume. With splintered sources and continuous headlines, it seems more difficult to pick up on a single distinct scent and evaluate it.
Thank you, Kyle. You saw a lot over the course of your career. I expect that you also saw how balancing budgets for the sake of journalism was replaced by expanding profits at the expense of journalism. It's probably true, as Jay says elsewhere in this thread, that legacy organizations have followed the corporate model to a point of untrustworthiness -- or to a point at which old metrics for reliability no longer apply.
Joshua, this a terrific look at where journalism is going and some serious pitfalls facing all of us who have shifted to running our own shows on a platform like Substack. It’s not that it can’t be done well and with the 9 key elements of journalism in mind. But it does require honesty with readers about how you’re vetting sources, checking facts, and editing the work produced.
You are right that outlets like the *Contrarian*, *Persuasion*, and the *Free Press* assume their audience will trust them or understand that they’re “real” journalists. They suffer from the same blindspots as legacy outlets like the NYT. I think the core processes of journalism need to be explained - and mentored - almost constantly to get across why a piece of nonfiction can’t just be based on your own opinion. It also shouldn’t simply be a performance or glad-handing session with those in power. I recently unsubscribed from a young journalist’s stack after watching her particularly fatuous and disingenuous interview with Hamish McKenzie.
Key to any of these new platforms is hiring copy-editors, fact-checkers, and researchers. Even if there are basic conflicts for newspreneurs writing and editing themselves, the basic principles can be maintained if you have other staffers doing vetting. That was how I ran things for nonfiction on Talking Writing, and I wasn’t producing news. Another strategy is to have fellow editors or writers on the platform read and check each other’s pieces. Regardless, editing and vetting do matter for quality.
My overall take is that a platform like Substack is good for personal opinion (in the journalistic sense), and so with Krugman, Reich et al. I know what I’m getting (as I do with Margaret Sullivan and Marc Jacob, Steve Bechloss and Jay Kuo). In first-person opinion mode, I think these journalists are honest about their biases and what they’re doing. But the new indie press platforms that don’t acknowledge biases, personal axes to grind, or their reportorial approach concern me as much as they do you.
And don’t get me started on what AI is doing to journalism or how it is undercutting media literacy. Ugh.
Thank you. No one should get a pass just because they have credentials. The great irony is that people who built their reputation in a traditional news organization want to point to that as their credential, but it doesn't work when that organization no longer exists in the way that it did. Trust must be earned from scratch and repeatedly.
Fair enough about opinion pieces. But there's still no fact checking, necessarily. And it's the potential for what is Left Out that troubles me most. You can write a clunker for the Times, as David Brooks has done repeatedly, and not suffer all that much. You'll get another crack the next time. But if you lay an egg or anger the wrong people or don't entertain quite consistently enough on Substack, you actually stand to lose personally in real time. That is an enormous problem. Anyone who says that they remain indifferent to the metrics when those metrics represent significant financial gain is a brazen liar.
There have been times when the conflicts of interest that McKenzie and Best ignore by hosting their own newsletters and actively promoting voices that genuflect toward them (as they did during the debate about Nazi content), hiding behind free speech while they profit directly from both the scoundrels and the mensches, have made me feel that this platform, too, was morally bankrupt. There are far too many examples of favor trading. Too many "pick me" hands waving. Critique is not an attack -- it is a way of maintaining integrity.
I've now come to the conclusion that Substack is deeply flawed, but that those flaws can be overcome by transparency. But it really does require constant reminders, because there is an ocean of content, all formatted in the same way, all aesthetically indistinguishable. That is no small thing for reliability.
WordPress always prided itself on the sheer number of available themes and the ability to customize your site, even include custom HTML. Substack is the opposite of that. Although at first it looks like this is to keep the editing process simple, it also has the effect of making all the writing look alike.
One question, I suppose, is if writing that looks alike will tend to sound alike. Maybe a chicken-egg question.
Jay makes a good point above about how everyone is lumped under one label, "writer," which further confuses the many different roles that writers play on the platform. The idea of a general equality is not useful in that sense and only heightens the responsibility of journalists to distinguish their methods from others. A default trust in reliability seems unwarranted.
Ada, an undergraduate blogger over at Ada’s Film Depository, recently used (coined?) the term “Wikipedia-itis” in one of her film reviews. For example, telling a poet’s bio without conveying much sense of the poetry. Wikipedia is probably a reasonably reliable source for many, many things, but there’s no exclamations of surprise or joy there, just an endless scroll of nerveless, seemingly authorless prose, fact after fact after fact, organized the way we’re taught to organize facts in eighth grade. Relying too much on it may affect the structure and aesthetic of our writing, even the range of our ideas.
I am with you on all this, Joshua. Transparency is required about conflicts of interest and personal biases, and it can be a hard discipline if you just want to get the next post out to keep your numbers up. I also think personal opinion writing requires credible counterpoints and counter examples, a practice that’s often dropped as soon as journalists start writing on their own. (Brooks is an example of someone who rarely includes good counterpoints, but because he’s at the NYT, the obligatory caveats paragraph - “Of course some people would say…” - is usually shoehorned in).
Excellent piece, Josh, making multiple important points, including that main one in the title. I'll extend and examine a couple.
Your thesis touches on Stubstack's questionable stance regarding its own nature and role. The constant promotion of its success stories and of Substacks devoted to training for Substack success makes sense as a business matter. They're here to make money and survive; otherwise, all the good things for writers disappear. But such a perspective fails to acknowledge (Substack obviously knows of) the array of different kinds of Substackers.: the old pro, longtime successes vs the newbies. The creative writers vs the journalists, the blogger-newsletter writers vs the artists, the avocationists vs the vocationists. On Substack, everyone is called a "writer" (don't get me started on "creative"), but these are all different roles, with different natures, needs, and responsibilities.
Substack ignores this, to the misleading detriment of many. Back when the great Nazi debate took place, Substack took the position and many were misled in their thinking to believe that Substack is a provider of publishing *tools* and not a publisher, and thus individual Substack writers are also publishers. They are not. They don't control the publication platform, however much Substack promotes the notion of creative control by individual writers. Whatever editorial control Substack does or does not exercise (regarding for instance, Nazis), it is free, as a privately owned business, to exercise whatever editorial control it wishes. Editorial controls not exercised are an editorial position too. They can be massaged in the corporate consciousness into a claim that publishing Nazi-sympathetic, racist, and voices subversive of democracy is a principled stand rather than a profit-seeking principle.
Thus, while I of course agree with you about all the benefits of multi-level editorial review and control in ideally producing more rigorous journalism and preventing the negative examples of newspreneurship you cite, just like Substack, the New York Times can develop a corporately interested perspective that degrades its standards. The public sphere is by this time overflowing with the execrably pusillanimous Times headlines and phraseology of recent years. Today, we get Elon Musk's "aggressive incursion" into government operations rather than "coup." Is it possible that a corporate mindset, editorially executed and enforced across multiple reviews is at work? And what is that mindset? That the times does not wish to be perceived as "partisan" because it doesn't want its subscriber base to diminish?
Excellent points, Jay, about how the Times itself has been compromised.
The fact that none of this can be explained easily to a first-year college student is unacceptable.
You are also right on in explaining how a universal "writer" label confuses things. The word some people are using for media now is "information ecosystems," which is even sadder since that term originated in library science as a way of explaining reputable systems built by experts for the sake of good faith research.
Thanks for writing, Joshua. We’re definitely struggling to maintain a common knowledge, instead of splintered realities. We need strong and responsible news sources that serve the entirety of their local communities, not a partisan agenda.
I would frame it more as the decline of the old news business model weakening the system. Whether or not a given for-profit owner was too aggressive in harvesting revenue, the sector struggled to maintain any growth. The NYT wobbled but ultimately crossed the bridge thanks to its international footprint and smart diversification enabling its pivot to a heavier subscriber model. Trust erosion has come thanks to legacy media no longer serving its audience but also because the digital roar now defines true modern media more than anything carefully curated by editors.
A smart take -- thank you. I remain mystified by how first-year students can be taught information literacy in this climate. Other smart people, like my friend Sam Kahn, see this as just inevitable and think that one either goes with the flow or they don't. Do you think the SMELL test still applies, or must a new one be written for the digital roar?
The SMELL test principles are pretty sound, even today. Maybe the problem is sheer volume. With splintered sources and continuous headlines, it seems more difficult to pick up on a single distinct scent and evaluate it.
Thank you, Kyle. You saw a lot over the course of your career. I expect that you also saw how balancing budgets for the sake of journalism was replaced by expanding profits at the expense of journalism. It's probably true, as Jay says elsewhere in this thread, that legacy organizations have followed the corporate model to a point of untrustworthiness -- or to a point at which old metrics for reliability no longer apply.
Joshua, this a terrific look at where journalism is going and some serious pitfalls facing all of us who have shifted to running our own shows on a platform like Substack. It’s not that it can’t be done well and with the 9 key elements of journalism in mind. But it does require honesty with readers about how you’re vetting sources, checking facts, and editing the work produced.
You are right that outlets like the *Contrarian*, *Persuasion*, and the *Free Press* assume their audience will trust them or understand that they’re “real” journalists. They suffer from the same blindspots as legacy outlets like the NYT. I think the core processes of journalism need to be explained - and mentored - almost constantly to get across why a piece of nonfiction can’t just be based on your own opinion. It also shouldn’t simply be a performance or glad-handing session with those in power. I recently unsubscribed from a young journalist’s stack after watching her particularly fatuous and disingenuous interview with Hamish McKenzie.
Key to any of these new platforms is hiring copy-editors, fact-checkers, and researchers. Even if there are basic conflicts for newspreneurs writing and editing themselves, the basic principles can be maintained if you have other staffers doing vetting. That was how I ran things for nonfiction on Talking Writing, and I wasn’t producing news. Another strategy is to have fellow editors or writers on the platform read and check each other’s pieces. Regardless, editing and vetting do matter for quality.
My overall take is that a platform like Substack is good for personal opinion (in the journalistic sense), and so with Krugman, Reich et al. I know what I’m getting (as I do with Margaret Sullivan and Marc Jacob, Steve Bechloss and Jay Kuo). In first-person opinion mode, I think these journalists are honest about their biases and what they’re doing. But the new indie press platforms that don’t acknowledge biases, personal axes to grind, or their reportorial approach concern me as much as they do you.
And don’t get me started on what AI is doing to journalism or how it is undercutting media literacy. Ugh.
Thank you. No one should get a pass just because they have credentials. The great irony is that people who built their reputation in a traditional news organization want to point to that as their credential, but it doesn't work when that organization no longer exists in the way that it did. Trust must be earned from scratch and repeatedly.
Fair enough about opinion pieces. But there's still no fact checking, necessarily. And it's the potential for what is Left Out that troubles me most. You can write a clunker for the Times, as David Brooks has done repeatedly, and not suffer all that much. You'll get another crack the next time. But if you lay an egg or anger the wrong people or don't entertain quite consistently enough on Substack, you actually stand to lose personally in real time. That is an enormous problem. Anyone who says that they remain indifferent to the metrics when those metrics represent significant financial gain is a brazen liar.
There have been times when the conflicts of interest that McKenzie and Best ignore by hosting their own newsletters and actively promoting voices that genuflect toward them (as they did during the debate about Nazi content), hiding behind free speech while they profit directly from both the scoundrels and the mensches, have made me feel that this platform, too, was morally bankrupt. There are far too many examples of favor trading. Too many "pick me" hands waving. Critique is not an attack -- it is a way of maintaining integrity.
I've now come to the conclusion that Substack is deeply flawed, but that those flaws can be overcome by transparency. But it really does require constant reminders, because there is an ocean of content, all formatted in the same way, all aesthetically indistinguishable. That is no small thing for reliability.
Substack newsletters: “all formatted in the same way, all aesthetically indistinguishable.”
That’s probably more important than we might think. John Gruber touched on this branding aspect of Substack last year:
https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/regarding_and_well_against_substack
WordPress always prided itself on the sheer number of available themes and the ability to customize your site, even include custom HTML. Substack is the opposite of that. Although at first it looks like this is to keep the editing process simple, it also has the effect of making all the writing look alike.
One question, I suppose, is if writing that looks alike will tend to sound alike. Maybe a chicken-egg question.
Jay makes a good point above about how everyone is lumped under one label, "writer," which further confuses the many different roles that writers play on the platform. The idea of a general equality is not useful in that sense and only heightens the responsibility of journalists to distinguish their methods from others. A default trust in reliability seems unwarranted.
Ada, an undergraduate blogger over at Ada’s Film Depository, recently used (coined?) the term “Wikipedia-itis” in one of her film reviews. For example, telling a poet’s bio without conveying much sense of the poetry. Wikipedia is probably a reasonably reliable source for many, many things, but there’s no exclamations of surprise or joy there, just an endless scroll of nerveless, seemingly authorless prose, fact after fact after fact, organized the way we’re taught to organize facts in eighth grade. Relying too much on it may affect the structure and aesthetic of our writing, even the range of our ideas.
I am with you on all this, Joshua. Transparency is required about conflicts of interest and personal biases, and it can be a hard discipline if you just want to get the next post out to keep your numbers up. I also think personal opinion writing requires credible counterpoints and counter examples, a practice that’s often dropped as soon as journalists start writing on their own. (Brooks is an example of someone who rarely includes good counterpoints, but because he’s at the NYT, the obligatory caveats paragraph - “Of course some people would say…” - is usually shoehorned in).