Writing — appropriately — on Substack, Jen Gerson outlines her transition from full-time journalist to journalist-subsisting-on-the-crumbs-of-direct-reader-support at The Line:
True story: an ambitious young man with an idea for a startup gave me a ring on the phone. He wanted to start a new platform for writers and journalists; what would it take to encourage a writer like me to abandon the mainstream media and go fully independent? I explained the sort of site that might entice me — a clean and painless user interface, basic word processor, and something to take care of IT and payment back end. I then hung up the phone and thought to myself: “Nice guy. Too bad that idea isn’t going anywhere.”
After all, why would I abandon paying gigs in mainstream journalism for the uncertainty of direct reader support? It was a crazy idea.
Years passed.
Well, this gentleman went off to form a company called, uh, Substack, and after Andrew Sullivan left New York Magazine to reconstitute the Daily Dish under the aegis on this very platform, I was forced to dredge up this gentleman’s email and offer to eat my hat.
Because by then, mainstream media was in a state of financial and moral disarray and it was time for me to do what I would have done three years earlier if I had possessed the foresight — start The Line. In any case, the founder of Substack was very kind and even managed to schedule a call with me, at which point I said: “OK, you were right.”
This was one of the conversations that eventually led to my co-founding this fine newsletter that you are reading now, but in the course of this chat I had to ask another question: “You know they’re going to come after you, right? Are you ready for that?”
He said Substack is, indeed, committed to serving its community of writers — provided they aren’t spreading hate or disinformation, of course — but I suspect the company is only beginning to gain a glimpse of the test ahead.
When I read the Columbia Journalism Review‘s piece “The Substackerati“, released this week, my first response was: “Ah, and so it begins. The problematization of Substack.”
