Ideas for Substack, plus prediction markets
The beginning of Backstage
It was Earth Day this week. Earth Day is personally important to me, for reasons I might talk about another time.
Once upon a time I used to send out a comic to people I knew every Earth Day. It was a lot of work so I haven’t done it for years, but here’s an excerpt from one of those old comics.
This week I started a new feature on Front Stage Exit: Backstage. Backstage will be roughly daily (Mon - Fri), with quick takes on topics in crypto, media, health and the news.
They won’t go out over email till Saturday, like today, when I run a roundup.
This is the part where the writer usually comes up with a grand statement about how this offering fits into the grander scheme of media or a needed bit of commentary in the broader market. I don’t have that. I just had this idea IDK.
The first two Backstages were not brief. They are product ideas for Substack proper that I’ve been sitting on for a while. Fridays is brief, though, and it’s about the news that an actual U.S. army soldier allegedly bet on an operation using Polymarket. Which feels bad.
Week of April 20
'Substack News' or Why platforms should open newsrooms
Welcome to the first edition of Backstage. My daily opinion essay here on Front Stage Exit. I won’t be sending these out over the list. Instead, I’ll do a weekend email with summaries of all of them. But you can see them as they come out here on Substack.
💰 News doesn’t have a business model. Platforms have a business model, though, and social media platforms needs news so that users have something to start talking about. So social media platforms should open news desks. It actually aligns.
The price elasticity of unlimited Substack
Jeff Bezos has already shown Chris Best how Substack could bring in more revenue for writers — he’s just gotta take the leap.
∞ Substack subscriptions cost too much for most people to subscribe to that many. But what if every writer could make more if there were a price for unlimited access?
It has worked before.
🔮 I’ve been going around whispering in the ears of reporters for a year or so now about what I suspect to be a very big story in Washington. This week’s news suggests my guess was wrong, though. What’s really going on looks much more depressing than what I expected.
Prediction markets put corruption just a click away for everyone.
Help I’m Alive
In other news, Metric has a new album, Romanticize the Dive. Emily Haines has been living right at that edge of smart indie and rock pop for 25 years now. She’s been on heavy rotation for me going back to the mid-2000s.
This one is probably on my list of personal anthems, along with “Autoclave” and “Gimme Back My Bullets.”
Maybe you’re not that into music and Metric doesn’t mean anything to you. Do you like movies? Remember that epic song in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the one performed by his legendary ex-girlfriend, Envy Adams (Brie Larson), the front for the band, The Clash at Demonhead? That was a Metric song!
So I watch this video about ten times a year, because I love the movie and I love Metric:
This new album has an incredible new track on it called “Time Is A Bomb.” I can’t even really tell you how I feel about that track. It’s not germane to this publication.
Till next Saturday.