The New World Struggles to be Born, The Old World Struggles to Keep Padding Its Resume a meandering consideration of the industry I ostensibly belong to

The book review contest winners have been picked. Congratulations to winner Alicia Kenworthy and runners-up Hal Johnson and Ethan Spiegelman! I will be reaching out to the winners individually by email today to arrange payment. There will be a brief post soon with more details, along with the call for February’s subscriber writing submissions. (Yes, folks.) Thanks for everybody’s patience. Choosing was harder than ever before, and it was already hard the past few times. I hate hate hate choosing. I really do. Except for those of you who blew past the word count limit, you were easy to reject, doing me a favor. Anyway, I’m thinking we’re gonna do a straight raffle or something else this year, I can’t take the guilt. I don’t know, I gotta think about it. OK on with the show. I found this little item in The Atlantic from a few weeks ago to be an amusing volley in an old war. It’s part of a long lineage of establishment publications working to guard whatever lingering sense of superiority they have left, from a writer named Kaitlyn Tiffany. Substack, which got its start by offering mainstream journalists lucrative profit-sharing arrangements, has embraced a Muskian set of free-speech principles: As Jonathan Katz reported for The Atlantic last month, the company’s leadership is unwilling to remove avowed Nazis from its platform. (In a statement published last week, Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s co-founders, said, “We don’t like Nazis either,” but he and his fellow executives are “committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.”) The trajectory of both resembles that of Rumble, which started out as a YouTube alternative offering different monetization options for creators, then pulled itself far to the political fringes and has been very successful. First, this appears to contains a flat factual inaccuracy: it’s simply historical incorrect to say that Substack “got its start by offering mainstream journalists lucrative profit-sharing arrangements.” Substack’s core financial arrangement is to host newsletters and handle payment integration, in return for which Substack takes a percentage of subscription revenues; this is only “profit-sharing” in the loosest and least-accurate sense. (Am I also “profit-sharing” with Stripe? Are grocery stores profit-sharing with Mastercard? Am I profit-sharing with the government when I pay income taxes?) I suspect that this is a reference, instead, to Substack’s brief, much-maligned period of offering advances to people (like me) to entice us onto the platform and make it seem more viable for serious writerer types. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Substack leadership team regrets ever starting that program. They more than made their money back on most of the deals they made, as I understand it, but the PR ended up being awful - in large part because of the busy work of people at places like The Atlantic, which have been trying to stamp out this sort of independent competition for as long as paid newsletters have been a thing. Besides, Substack became a thoroughly conventional place to write in the past couple of years, dead-tree media be damned, and I don’t think they offer any advances at all anymore. Either way, Substack started in 2017, the first advances went out in 2020, and before that happened there were already writers on the platform making six figures a year. To suggest that poaching through advances created the platform is the kind of factual inaccuracy places like The Atlantic are supposed to avoid. If that’s not what Tiffany is suggesting, then she’s got a profoundly expansive definition of profit-sharing... Freddie deBoer © 2024 Fredrik deBoer 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104