At The Line, Matt Gurney discusses Substack in the light of extreme criticism by, among others, UCLA professor of information studies Dr. Sarah T. Roberts:
It wasn’t long ago that Jen Gerson and I wrote damn similar columns within days of each other. She was writing here, at The Line, and I was writing at my personal blog, Code 47. We both discussed Substack, the digital publishing company you’re reading at this very moment — The Line is currently hosted on Substack.
Or, if you prefer, Substack is a “a dangerous direct threat to traditional news media” and “a threat to journalism.”
That is the view of Dr. Sarah T. Roberts, a professor of information studies at UCLA, who unloaded on Substack (and some of those who use it) in a recent Twitter thread. You can read it here, and should, but for our purposes, Roberts argues that Substack is bad because it lets journalists who have come up through the traditional newsroom system bail on it, stop bothering with the trouble of an editor, “cash out” on the reputation they earned in newsrooms, and transform themselves from a “journalist” to that vastly lower order of life, “an opinion writer, at best.” Ouch!
Roberts makes an explicit appeal to her Twitter followers: do not pay for Substack content. Do not write for Substack. (She does carve out exceptions for purely personal blogs on trivial topics.) But Substack as a journalism venture is, in her view, “incredibly dangerous and damaging” to “one of the few failsafes against anti-democratic maneuvers … We really can’t afford to lose [journalism] right now.”
This is my summary of what she said — perhaps she’d quibble with it, which is why I’m encouraging you, all of you, to go read her original thread. Get it in her own words and judge for yourself if I’ve been fair.
Assuming I’ve passed your muster, like, yikes. Where to start?
Roberts is, of course, as entitled to her views as any one, and if she hates Substack with a fiery passion, that’s totally fine. And I think there is some truth to her argument, as Jen and I both noted in our earlier pieces: there no doubt are some people with big profiles, who built those profiles working for traditional newsrooms, who will bail on that job to go make money — maybe lots of money! — on Substack. This is a threat to legacy media organizations, who are more reliant than ever on a few key contributors, who serve not only as click magnets, but also human avatars of an outlet’s brand. Roberts’ argument is on the money here.
But the sum of what she left out of her argument is so gigantic that it practically warrants a Substack of its own.
