SUBSTACK:
Independent Writing has Never Been so Easy
J
ournalism is witnessing the rise of a new business model — and the newsle er pla orm Substack is right in the center of it. Substack, an email list platform for writers, which recently celebrated its 3rd birthday, has quickly drawn a enon from the media industry for its simple promise: “making it easy to set
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up a subscrip on and collect payment from readers,““ which sounds extremely cap va ng for authors. What is more, Substack makes it easier than ever for writers to leave tradi onal publica ons behind and mone ze their own wri ng directly. “I think writers have always realized their own value; there just weren’t a lot of op ons in the
post-2008 recession for how to make good on it,” says Anne Helen Peterson, one of the top-writers at Substack. “But all of this feels very cyclical to me. The economy tanks, writers get laid off from their publica ons, writers go freelance, writers find success with scrappy publica ons, mainstream publica ons hire those writers, scrappy publica ons