This coming year, 2021, is when general interest publications will finally embrace micropayments for consumers who aren’t ready to make a long-term commitment, or who only want to access one or two articles without adding another username and password to their growing list of subscriptions.
Just kidding. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, in part because, as this Digiday article on “why micropayments for news schemes struggle to take off” explained way back in 2015, they’re “mentally taxing for users.” (For more on the problems with micropayments, see this Twitter thread.)
What’s also mentally — and financially! — taxing for users, though, is that lengthening list of subscriptions. It never stops growing. As more writers extricate themselves from the publishers that helped to create their brand in the first place, consumers are left deciding which, and how many, to follow into independence. Even if you use a password manager (or are one of the lucky few who don’t seem to need to log back into your New York account every single time you navigate to Vulture or The Cut), there are still all the monthly payments, and they add up. Just two Substack subscriptions at $5/month will cost you as much as an entire year of The New Yorker. Most of us are going to max out soon, if we haven’t already.
Writers know this. It’s a good gig if you can get it, as they say, but just as there’s only one Stephenie Meyer despite modern-day self-publishing entering middle age, there’s also only one Andrew Sullivan and one Glenn Greenwald (thankfully). And though we’d like there to be more, there’s also only one Ann Friedman, who recently wrote openly about how newsletters are “a bit of a pyramid scheme” in that “a few successful people at the top make it seem like the system works for everyone, when in fact there is no way for most folks to make it up from the bottom.” When the venture capital funding that Substack is passing on to creators in order to lure them to the platform runs dry, we’ll see how many are making enough to keep putting in the hours on their own.
Will the go-it-alone model work for many? Maybe! The team behind Substack has built something I find truly enjoyable, and I’ll celebrate any attempt to build new revenue streams for writing and reporting (though how much reporting can be done without support systems — editors, fact-checkers, copy-editors, and lawyers, oh my — remains to be seen).
But what I think you’re more likely to see, and soon, are more bundles. When writers can’t make it on their own, they’ll band together. When they want to share the responsibilities for figuring out insurance and health care and other benefits, they’ll join forces with others who want similar things. When they want to put out a weekly product but only be responsible for publishing once a month, they’ll find three friends. And it’ll be easier for potential subscribers to justify the expense of a bundle — not just more content, but a diversity of content, and voices, all for one price and under one subscription. It’ll probably look a lot like a magazine, but on the internet. Growing up, we used to call them blogs. (Unless you’re Slate, which has been calling itself a magazine for 24 years now, even though it only looks like one if you print it out at home and staple it together yourself.)
The primary difference is that these blogs, these magazines, these whatevers, will be built and guided by the individual creators for their audience, not by the executives they once reported to or their shareholders and owners. And that’s interesting. You’re unlikely to see a new brand from Condé Nast this year, which is still trying (and failing) to clean up the ongoing problems at Bon Appetit. But we’ve already seen exciting new launches like Defector, from the team that brought you Deadspin, and Brick House, a media cooperative owned by the editors of the publications that it houses.
Maybe these will live on Substack 2.0, which is almost certainly going to create its own bundling tools, and soon, despite its claims that it’s not a publisher or media company. Or they’ll live on Lede, a new publishing and subscription platform from the people behind Alley. Or they’ll look completely different from either of those things. It won’t matter much to readers, who all benefit from the great re-bundling. Or to writers, who have an opportunity here to create a more fair and equitable media industry, this time from the bottom up.
Nicholas Jackson is the director of content at Built In and former editor-in-chief of Pacific Standard.
This coming year, 2021, is when general interest publications will finally embrace micropayments for consumers who aren’t ready to make a long-term commitment, or who only want to access one or two articles without adding another username and password to their growing list of subscriptions.
Just kidding. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, in part because, as this Digiday article on “why micropayments for news schemes struggle to take off” explained way back in 2015, they’re “mentally taxing for users.” (For more on the problems with micropayments, see this Twitter thread.)
What’s also mentally — and financially! — taxing for users, though, is that lengthening list of subscriptions. It never stops growing. As more writers extricate themselves from the publishers that helped to create their brand in the first place, consumers are left deciding which, and how many, to follow into independence. Even if you use a password manager (or are one of the lucky few who don’t seem to need to log back into your New York account every single time you navigate to Vulture or The Cut), there are still all the monthly payments, and they add up. Just two Substack subscriptions at $5/month will cost you as much as an entire year of The New Yorker. Most of us are going to max out soon, if we haven’t already.
Writers know this. It’s a good gig if you can get it, as they say, but just as there’s only one Stephenie Meyer despite modern-day self-publishing entering middle age, there’s also only one Andrew Sullivan and one Glenn Greenwald (thankfully). And though we’d like there to be more, there’s also only one Ann Friedman, who recently wrote openly about how newsletters are “a bit of a pyramid scheme” in that “a few successful people at the top make it seem like the system works for everyone, when in fact there is no way for most folks to make it up from the bottom.” When the venture capital funding that Substack is passing on to creators in order to lure them to the platform runs dry, we’ll see how many are making enough to keep putting in the hours on their own.
Will the go-it-alone model work for many? Maybe! The team behind Substack has built something I find truly enjoyable, and I’ll celebrate any attempt to build new revenue streams for writing and reporting (though how much reporting can be done without support systems — editors, fact-checkers, copy-editors, and lawyers, oh my — remains to be seen).
But what I think you’re more likely to see, and soon, are more bundles. When writers can’t make it on their own, they’ll band together. When they want to share the responsibilities for figuring out insurance and health care and other benefits, they’ll join forces with others who want similar things. When they want to put out a weekly product but only be responsible for publishing once a month, they’ll find three friends. And it’ll be easier for potential subscribers to justify the expense of a bundle — not just more content, but a diversity of content, and voices, all for one price and under one subscription. It’ll probably look a lot like a magazine, but on the internet. Growing up, we used to call them blogs. (Unless you’re Slate, which has been calling itself a magazine for 24 years now, even though it only looks like one if you print it out at home and staple it together yourself.)
The primary difference is that these blogs, these magazines, these whatevers, will be built and guided by the individual creators for their audience, not by the executives they once reported to or their shareholders and owners. And that’s interesting. You’re unlikely to see a new brand from Condé Nast this year, which is still trying (and failing) to clean up the ongoing problems at Bon Appetit. But we’ve already seen exciting new launches like Defector, from the team that brought you Deadspin, and Brick House, a media cooperative owned by the editors of the publications that it houses.
Maybe these will live on Substack 2.0, which is almost certainly going to create its own bundling tools, and soon, despite its claims that it’s not a publisher or media company. Or they’ll live on Lede, a new publishing and subscription platform from the people behind Alley. Or they’ll look completely different from either of those things. It won’t matter much to readers, who all benefit from the great re-bundling. Or to writers, who have an opportunity here to create a more fair and equitable media industry, this time from the bottom up.
Nicholas Jackson is the director of content at Built In and former editor-in-chief of Pacific Standard.
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Joshua P. Darr Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis
Whitney Phillips Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods
Jer Thorp Fewer pixels, more cardboard
Rachel Schallom The rise of nonprofit journalism continues
Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli Defund the crime beat
Garance Franke-Ruta Rebundling content, rebuilding connections
Michael W. Wagner Fractured democracy, fractured journalism
Natalie Meade Journalism enters rehab
Alfred Hermida and Oscar Westlund The virus ups data journalism’s game
Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation
Nonny de la Pena News reaches the third dimension
Talmon Joseph Smith The media rejects deficit hawkery
Mike Ananny Toward better tech journalism
Nabiha Syed Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships
Sumi Aggarwal News literacy programs aren’t child’s play
Marissa Evans Putting community trauma into context
Jim Friedlich A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses
Richard Tofel Less on politics, more on how government works (or doesn’t)
C.W. Anderson Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?
Bo Hee Kim Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture
Jennifer Choi What have we done for you lately?
Joni Deutsch Local arts and music make journalism more joyous
Ryan Kellett The bundle gets bundled
Jessica Clark News becomes plural
Rishad Patel From direct-to-consumer to direct-to-believers
Taylor Lorenz Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy
Linda Solomon Wood Canada steps up for journalism
David Chavern Local video finally gets momentum
Kristen Muller Engaged journalism scales
Beena Raghavendran Journalism gets fused with art
Bill Adair The future of fact-checking is all about structured data
Nisha Chittal The year we stop pivoting
Sam Ford We’ll find better ways to archive our work
Mike Caulfield 2021’s misinformation will look a lot like 2020’s (and 2019’s, and…)
Parker Molloy The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump
Julia Angwin Show your (computational) work
Matt Skibinski Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it
Ray Soto The news gets spatial
Brian Moritz The year sports journalism changes for good
Ashton Lattimore Remote work helps level the playing field in an insular industry
Benjamin Toff Beltway reporting gets normal again, for better and for worse
Tamar Charney Public radio has a midlife crisis
Sarah Marshall The year audiences need extra cheer
Megan McCarthy Readers embrace a low-information diet
Pia Frey Building growth through tastemakers and their communities
Charo Henríquez A new path to leadership
Mariano Blejman It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism
Brandy Zadrozny Misinformation fatigue sets in
Rodney Gibbs Zooming beyond talking heads
Mark Stenberg The rise of the journalist-influencer
Kevin D. Grant Parachute journalism goes away for good
Zizi Papacharissi The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth
Edward Roussel Tech companies get aggressive in local
Tim Carmody Spotify will make big waves in video
Chase Davis The year we look beyond The Story
Francesca Tripodi Don’t expect breaking up Google and Facebook to solve our information woes
Kawandeep Virdee Goodbye, doomscroll
Renée Kaplan Falling in love with your subscription
Ariane Bernard Going solo is still only a path for the few
Loretta Chao Open up the profession
Gordon Crovitz Common law will finally apply to the Internet
Nico Gendron Ask your readers to help build your products
Ariel Zirulnick Local newsrooms question their paywalls
Jeremy Gilbert Human-centered journalism
Colleen Shalby The definition of good journalism shifts
Cory Bergman The year after a thousand earthquakes
Imaeyen Ibanga Journalism gets unmasked
Marcus Mabry News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)
Meredith D. Clark The year journalism starts paying reparations
Matt DeRienzo Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality
A.J. Bauer The year of MAGAcal thinking
Jennifer Brandel A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation
Sarah Stonbely Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity
Doris Truong Indigenous issues get long-overdue mainstream coverage
Sara M. Watson Return of the RSS reader
Rachel Glickhouse Journalists will be kinder to each other — and to themselves
Victor Pickard The commercial era for local journalism is over
Anna Nirmala Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots
Francesco Zaffarano The year we ask the audience what it needs
Ernie Smith Entrepreneurship on rails
Danielle C. Belton A decimated media rededicates itself to truth
Anthony Nadler Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy
Logan Jaffe History as a reporting tool
Steve Henn Has independent podcasting peaked?
Amara Aguilar Journalism schools emphasize listening
Andrew Ramsammy Stop being polite and start getting real
David Skok A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation
Tonya Mosley True equity means ownership
Astead W. Herndon The Trump-sized window of the media caring about race closes again
Moreno Cruz Osório In Brazil, a push for pluralism
Nikki Usher Don’t expect an antitrust dividend for the media
Janet Haven and Sam Hinds Is this an AI newsroom?
Juleyka Lantigua The download, podcasting’s metric king, gets dethroned
Jonas Kaiser Toward a wehrhafte journalism
Zainab Khan From understanding to feeling
Delia Cai Subscriptions start working for the middle
Sonali Prasad Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise
Cindy Royal J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability
Andrew Donohue The rise of the democracy beat
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen Stop pretending publishers are a united front
Stefanie Murray and Anthony Advincula Expect to see more translations and non-English content
Raney Aronson-Rath To get past information divides, we need to understand them first
Laura E. Davis The focus turns to newsroom leaders for lasting change
Jacqué Palmer The rise of the plain-text email newsletter
M. Scott Havens Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption
John Saroff Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites
Cherian George Enter the lamb warriors
Celeste Headlee The rise of radical newsroom transparency
John Ketchum More journalists of color become newsroom founders
Burt Herman Journalists build post-Facebook digital communities
Rick Berke Virtual events are here to stay
Alyssa Zeisler Holistic medicine for journalism
AX Mina 2020 isn’t a black swan — it’s a yellow canary
Christoph Mergerson Black Americans will demand more from journalism
Mark S. Luckie Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy
Kerri Hoffman Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem
Annie Rudd Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”
Aaron Foley Diversity gains haven’t shown up in local news
Eric Nuzum Podcasting dodged a bullet in 2020, but 2021 will be harder
Hossein Derakhshan Mass personalization of truth
Ståle Grut Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox
Joanne McNeil Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism
Mandy Jenkins You build trust by helping your readers
Tanya Cordrey Declining trust forces publishers to claim (or disclaim) values
Ben Werdmuller The web blooms again
Jody Brannon People won’t renew
Marie Shanahan Journalism schools stop perpetuating the status quo
John Davidow Reflect and repent
Sue Cross A global consensus around the kind of news we need to save
Don Day Business first, journalism second
Masuma Ahuja We’ll remember how interconnected our world is
Patrick Butler Covid-19 reporting has prepared us for cross-border collaboration
Gabe Schneider Another year of empty promises on diversity
J. Siguru Wahutu Journalists still wrongly think the U.S. is different
Robert Hernandez Data and shame
Alicia Bell and Simon Galperin Media reparations now
José Zamora Walking the talk on diversity
Gonzalo del Peon Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side
Jesse Holcomb Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism
Chicas Poderosas More voices mean better information
Samantha Ragland The year of journalists taking initiative
Nicholas Jackson Blogging is back, but better
Julia B. Chan and Kim Bui Millennials are ready to run things
Catalina Albeanu Publish less, listen more
Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Cassie Haynes A shift from conversation to action
Candis Callison Calling it a crisis isn’t enough (if it ever was)
John Garrett A surprisingly good year
Kate Myers My son will join every Zoom call in our industry
María Sánchez Díez Traffic will plummet — and it’ll be ok
Errin Haines Let’s normalize women’s leadership
Hadjar Benmiloud Get representative, or die trying
Ben Collins We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists