'Substack News' or Why platforms should open newsrooms
The incentives and the business models actually do align
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.
Tech platforms wrecked the business model for news. Ironically, though, tech platforms also rely on the news industry to keep their attention-based model chugging.
That’s why tech platforms should open their own independent news desks. By mining the data spit off by platforms, managing editors guide the editorial direction of reporters toward topics that interested platform users. And news would actually have a business model again.
Platforms might not quite be the new nations, but they are the land masses of the internet. It’s time to just deal with it.
What I’m about to propose here will annoy just about everyone. Just ask yourself please about whether or your irritation compares it to the hypothetical ideal of a long lost era or to the present, extremely bleak and far from perfect reality, please.
How platforms wrecked news
Everyone knows the story about how Craigslist came along and yoinked classifieds from newspapers.
Then Google and Facebook came along with a wildly better way of targeting other kinds of advertising directly to the kind of consumers a given advertiser wants.
The The New Yorker can say: “Our users are broadly 35- to 55-year old, high net-worth coastal professionals” (or whatever they say — they aren’t pitching me), but Facebook could say, “Do you want a 35 to 39 year-old divorced guy in Columbus, Ohio, who loves Anime and no college education? Yeah. We know who every single one of those guys are, and we can show your ad to all of them.”
It wasn’t even close!
Everyone knows that Facebook and Google have become an advertising duopoly, and the only companies cutting into their duopolistic status are other platforms, such as Apple and Amazon. Media sites have no chance.
So you know that story. What’s talked about less, though, is how much the platforms crushed the other advantage news once had. News used to drive a lot of attention. People watched the news on TV. They read the paper. They listened to news radio.
None of that is really true any longer. Now they scroll and they stream. This is how media gets consumed. They don’t watch the 6 o’clock news because that’s what’s on TV. They watch whatever they want. And that’s not usually news.
There’s some research out there backing this up that I’ll point to in an upcoming essay.
So now in this era when news attempts to pivot to a subscription-based model, it’s coming really, really late. People already very much like the infinite candy of social. The habit of the news is long lost.
If you can’t beat ‘em
But here’s the problem for the platforms: People like to talk about the news.
The News and the Media are often conflated. The Media is just about anything that holds your attention.
But the News is the business of going out and witnessing the world, then coming back and telling an audience what was seen. (It’s also talking to people doing interesting things, like writing laws and building robots, that aren’t conducive to photos).
News is telling the masses about the world, in short. On platforms, people want to talk about the world and what’s going on in it, but they need to know what’s going on.
But there’s fewer and fewer people out there going out and having a look, and those that remain are all going out and looking at the same things, too, because those are the things that are most likely to drive enough attention for them to keep going.
As people get frustrated with the quality of the information available, they also get frustrated with the platforms.
The platforms benefit from high quality information gathering. So the platforms should open news desks and hire reporters who establish beats that are responsive to the interests of platform users.
Substack News
The first concern I can imagine substackers having about Substack News would be that it would compete with them for attention and subscriptions.
But, wait!
Structured correctly, Substack News would drive more subscriptions for everyone.
What does Substack want? More paid subscribers. So here’s my idea: Make Substack News a premium feature that’s offered to anyone who pays to subscribe to literally any existing substack.
I suspect the toughest conversion for every user here is making that first paid subscription. Like, I’m a free user. I’ve never paid to see anyone. But I really really want to get access to every delicious thing that The Last Bite posts, however I’m just on the margin about subbing.
Is it quite worth it? I’m on a budget.
But ‘lo! Then you hear that every subscriber also gets access to this high quality newsroom that’s covering tech updates, foreign policy, climate change, economic development. All the big things.
All you have to do is buy one subscription to get access to all of it. You can have your cake (recipes) and (r)ea(d) (the news), too!
And others
Any platform that’s attempting to launch any sort of paid subscription should do the same thing: open newsrooms responsive to the main interests of its users.
X is the obvious other example of a platform that should open a news desk. It would probably take about 45 minutes before good reporters at X irritated Elon Musk, of course, but it’s a good concept in theory. People on X talk about the news constantly.
More reporting on more topics could drive more interesting engagement there. And obviously you’d only have full access if you bought an X premium account.
Netflix should obviously open a news desk. It’s the world’s new CBS. It should give its viewers an option to watch a new kind of nightly news.
Snapchat should add news to Snapchat+. Reddit has tried doing a publication before, and it failed, but it didn’t try News. Reddit Premium with News, focusing on reporting, not culture or criticism, could do better. It aligns rather than competes.
Some objections
Won’t these news desks be biased on behalf of the platforms?
Probably, but narrowly. The blind spots would be predictable. It wouldn’t take much media savvy to know which reports to give side eye and which ones are probably reliable.
And it’s not like reporting isn’t crazily biased now.
But, okay, to deal with that skepticism, jobs on platform newsdesks should be contract-based, not at will. The Editor-in-chief should have a contract for multiple years with clear performance indicators and clear editorial independence. All of this can be made public.
To me, the bandwidth of bias here is important but it’s narrow. Reporters in these rooms might be biased on behalf of the platform or even tech. It’s a much bigger world out there, though with much to discuss.
If, for example, Substack realized it had a ton of readers in Chicago and it opened a Chicago desk, would I worry about the Substack-bias corrupting Chicago coverage? Not really.
Objectivity should be a north star, but it is largely a fiction. I’d rather have more truth seeking in the world, even if I have to be a little skeptical about some of the truth-seekers’ coverage, than less.
And if Substack News covers Substack soft, count on X News to make up for it.
Idealism about this dying industry has a way of letting perfect oppose the good. Being biased toward Substack (or X or Reddit or whatever) doesn't matter, it seems to me, when you're covering trade policy or baseball contracts or the conflict in Argentina, but what do I know?
Won’t readers get mad at the reporters covering the platforms they love when their reporting contradicts users’ priors?
Yes. Hopefully! That still gives users something to talk about! And that’s what keeps users on the platforms.
Shouldn’t we want people to get off the platforms?
I’m just trying to deal with the world as it is, friend, not the world as I’d like it to be. If I were writing about the world as I’d like it to be, I’d just describe the 70s all day.
At the end of the day, News doesn’t have a business model any longer. Everything you dislike about “the media” is downstream from that.
The New York Times business model is being the New York Times (+Wordle). No one else can replicate that.
But platforms have a business model, but it’s one that needs good news gathering to really prosper. And if that news gathering can also help a platform deliver on what it promises its strongest users, revenue, then even better.
There’s a lot of talk about whether news can be decentralized. So far, I see media being decentralized, but I don’t see news decentralizing yet.
People are reading and watching stuff, for sure, but just because it’s on a screen, that doesn’t make it news. Substack has proven it can give writers a way to make money off their expertise, but there’s not much news gathering happening on here.
There’s research. There’s analysis. There’s opinion. God is there ever opinion.
But not many people are going out, having a look and just telling you what they saw. And if they do it sometimes, they aren’t doing it in a particularly structured way, by and large.
Tech platforms wrecked the news gathering business. I don’t fault them for it. Everyone’s gotta eat. But they are going to realize before long that they also depend on a continuous flow of good reporting.
Just as tech destroyed this industry, the platforms may soon realize that it’s also in their interest to build it back up.
Come back to Backstage tomorrow for my take on Substack Unlimited.