Becca Rothfeld and Sam Kahn on Substack vs. legacy media

A dialogue

Last month, Point editor Becca Rothfeld and cultural critic Sam Kahn used their respective Substacks to debate… the merits of Substack. The following conversation picks up and expands on that initial exchange, touching on broader questions about the value of the “institutional model” of legacy media, the importance of platforms for outsider writing, and whether the medium really is the message.

This is the second post in the Point’s Substack. Check out our introduction to learn more about how we intend to use this space.

Becca Rothfeld: In my first foray, I thought I’d start by restating the position I first articulated on my Substack, so as to allow readers of the magazine who aren’t on the site to catch up. Ultimately, I think we both agree that Substack is valuable. Where we disagree, maybe, is on the question of whether Substack is valuable in the same ways and for the same reasons that magazines and newspapers are valuable. My initial suspicion is that, most of the time, it is not.

As I see it, Substack is in many ways the heir to both pre-Trump Twitter (when it was populated by writers and intellectuals and was mercifully free of “thought leaders”) and the blogs of the early aughts (when they were anarchic and a little less smoothly professionalized than blogs tend to be today). In other words, Substack is a dynamic forum where writers congregate to air their unfiltered grievances, publish their weirdest prose and, crucially, participate in their favorite pastime: arguing.

Inevitably, then, a lot of the discourse on Substack is about the medium itself—its possibilities, its limitations, its role in the literary ecosystem. I am not exempt from déformation professionnelle, in this case a tendency toward neurotic self-examination, and in my initial posts, I ventured a qualified apologia for legacy media. (You might point out that this is a funny thing to do on Substack, and you would be right.)

In a way, it’s misleading to say that I defended legacy publications, because my view does not commit me to celebrating actually existing newspapers and magazines. Rather, what I mean to be defending is what I called the “institutional model”—one in which publications with fact-checkers, editors and some measure of material resources gather work from different writers in one place, support in-depth reporting and edit raw drafts. Plenty of independent literary publications conform to this model, many of them newcomers.

Writing on Substack is, by and large, produced under different conditions. (It bears noting that Substack is, after all, just a platform, and it hosts publications that conform more closely to the institutional model, such as the Free Press. For my purposes, however, these just count as falling on the institutional side of the dichotomy.) On the site, an “influencer model” tends to prevail. That is to say, on Substack and platforms like it, mavericks write their own newsletters without gatekeepers or guardrails.

To be sure, the influencer model has its benefits. It allows writers excluded from traditional venues to enter into the fray; it fosters editorial independence and independence of thought; and it permits established writers to publish more daring and adventurous work. The most interesting thing about it, at least to me, is that it enables us to watch writers shaping themselves into characters in real time. Some of my favorite works of literature—Eve Babitz’s sparkling writing about Los Angeles, Colette’s autofictional novels—succeed precisely because they involve such inspired performances of personality. If Babitz were writing online today, we’d probably say that her writing invites a kind of parasocial attachment. That’s an aesthetic merit.

But character creation is not without its risks. An environment that prizes displays of personality sometimes rewards careless exaggeration for the sake of the bit. (I’ve succumbed to these sorts of baser temptations myself, as you know.) And I think there are also structural features of the institutional model that allow it to foster a different and often deeper sort of writing. When it comes to reporting, money and material support are indispensable. It’s hard to imagine a lone wolf on Substack reporting effectively from a war zone, for instance. When it comes to the reading experience, it’s often more pleasant to read articles from different people that are all concentrated in one place. And I think editing almost always improves writing (I say this both as an editor and an editee).

Perhaps above all, I retain a sentimental attachment to the communal aspects of writing. I like talking ideas over with an editor. I like changing my mind in response to critiques. I like the almost sensual friction of encounters with another mind.

But of course, we’re in the process of changing each other’s minds right now—and this exchange began on Substack!

Sam Kahn: So I’ll pick up with where we agree and then move on from there. I’m glad you think Substack is valuable! And I can certainly concede the other side of the coin, that it’s very hard for individuals, on Substack or elsewhere, to replace an essentially group and institutional activity like a large news-gathering organization.

I would chip away there slightly that it’s a bit of an unfair fight that you’re proposing. Many of the legacy publications— the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc.—have been around for 150 years and to a great extent survive off that accrued authority (and the deep-pocketed individuals who have been willing to subsidize them). The Substack “publications” aren’t exactly imitating the older institutions. They believe that the distribution channel of the internet—and of a platform like Substack—allows them to be far more light-footed than their older competitors. They can have fact-checking, editing, original reporting and all of the good things, but they don’t need to be weighed down by office space or bureaucracy or the kinds of cash barriers that are distinctive to legacy media. There actually already is war reporting on Substack, and investigative reporting by experienced reporters, and there’s only going to be more as time goes by. You do slightly have to know where to look, though.

But the real point of contention here isn’t so much about reporting. It’s about underlying mindset. My argument is that you (and you’re certainly not alone in this) are vastly underestimating the potential of what Substack represents. You’ve written, “substack is a glorified blogging platform lol.” But I think you’re operating by analogy to recent models of discourse—to 2000s-era blogging or 2010s “influencing”—as opposed to thinking about what the form itself suggests. Substack is the blank page hooked up to the Internet. That’s the long and short of it, and if you think about that that’s unbelievably powerful—and also something that has never existed before. We didn’t have that in the long era of the printing press when the cost of producing and distributing books gave publishers tremendous oversight over what went out. We didn’t have that in the era of printed newspapers when the power of public discourse was consolidated in a newspaper office. We didn’t have that in the first round of social media, when discourse was severely constrained by character counts, etc. And we didn’t really have that in 2000s blogging when you needed a degree of technical savvy to set up a site—which tended to self-select the kinds of people who blog.

With Substack, the internet has reached a certain level of maturity where people can say whatever they want to say, at whatever length they want to say it, without requiring technical know-how, and with a decent chance that whatever they put out there will be read. To somebody who loves writing—as much as I know you do—I can’t imagine how that could be anything other than thrilling.

The place of dispute that we get to, then, is why a lot of the writing on the platform isn’t very good. And there a couple of major reasons for this. One is just that there are a lot of people on Substack who aren’t accomplished or professional writers—but this is of course the way it should be! It’s fun for me to read advice for chiefs of staff by other chiefs of staff, or memoirs by people who’ve had interesting lives and haven’t really written before—and never would have had their work picked up by traditional gatekeepers. What this does is it puts the onus on readers to be more wide-ranging and generous readers. You’re right of course that it’s not the same ease of use that you can get in a nicely laid-out newspaper, but what you lose there you gain in diversity of expression. Then, a lot of writers on Substack still have bad habits picked up from blogging or Twitter arguments, but to say this is a feature of the platform is a self-fulfilling loop. If people choose to publish only their “weirdest prose” on Substack—or stick to promotion for their more “serious” work—then, of course, the platform will have real limits. But, more and more, that’s just not the case. As the platform gains in popularity and credibility, more people—self included—are publishing their best work there, and are happy to trade the loss of an (often theoretical) paycheck for editorial freedom and the thriving community that you get in the comments. For me, the central question, then, isn’t about whether the platform is inherently better or worse. The platform is powerful enough that it’s whatever we make of it. The real question is what mindset we have.

This is the first of three exchanges; read the second and the third on The Point website.