Et tu, Charlie Warzel?
People love to hate Substack for lots of reasons.
I hate Substack because it complicates the way people access well-articulated intelligent viewpoints and ideas.
Writing classes require students to think through challenging topics and argue their own perspectives with well-supported claims. An essential part of this process asks students to pay attention to salient public conversations happening around important issues.
This is easy to do when you can find the conversations in opinion sections of America's most prominent news publications, and university libraries pay a ton of money to acquire subscriptions so students can access the most important viewpoints circulating around ideas, trends, and controversies.
This becomes far more complicated by the new media model which situates the writing of key figures in these discussions behind a personal paywall.
Substack allows talented social commentators to write newsletters for an audience of subscribers. This raises questions about how university libraries would provide access to the contributions happening in this ambiguous private/public sphere. Would libraries pay for a select list of writers, at $5 a month/$50 a year for each writer?
I understand why talented writers would choose to write on Substack. They do this for the same reason professors become consultants; it has the potential to be far more lucrative, allows for more creative freedom, and avoids frustrating institutional constraints.
I've known about Substack for a while, but I only began to hate it once I learned a few months ago that Charlie Warzel, a talented tech writer for The New York Times, was leaving to join Substack.
Warzel wrote beautiful, thoughtful pieces that had become anchors for my thinking about key trends and controversies throughout the pandemic. His profile of Michael Goldhaber, proclaimed the Cassandra of the internet age, helped me understand and better articulate the "attention economy" for my students. His impressive work with Stuart A. Thompson on tracking technology offered a compelling new analysis on why privacy matters. His article on Aron Rosenberg, who quit the internet two months before the pandemic, presented a fascinating example of how technology impacts the way we think, brilliantly illustrating Marshall McLuhan's maxim "the medium is the message."
And then Warzel left the NYT. Ugh.
I could have just subscribed to Warzel's Substack (and the growing collection of other writers I love on Substack), but instead I stewed. The Charlie Warzel exit churned up all kinds of civic indignation over the importance of access for all people to the "public square" where societies construct knowledge and discover truth.
But access to the public square has a long tradition of being privileged, be it behind a paywall or other means of entry/exclusion. It's ironic that the internet has radically opened up access to the public sphere to nearly everyone while also reshaping the public sphere in the process.
With free access to digital news, people are less willing to pay for subscriptions to local and national news publications. The loss of revenue has made cushy writing gigs in major publications far more competitive. Cultural trends have made working for those publications far more fraught.
Substack offers a lucrative option for talented writers and social commentators, but it also has the potential to reshape the "public sphere" and how people gain access to conversations shaping elite thinking.
The Substack model is meant to be affordable, like the penny papers of the 1830s. But even for readers who love the content of a particular writer, $5 a month/$50 a year is beyond what they can justify spending in addition to other subscriptions.
Excellent journalism is a valuable public service, and like anything valuable, consumers must be willing to pay for it. But I have a hard time seeing how Substack will move beyond service to a privileged class of readers.
It also poses unique challenges to educational access to excellent journalism for university libraries, educators, and students with limited resources.