Newsletters can't solve the trust problem
Newsletters can't solve the trust problem
Today’s newsletter is all about trust in media: how it’s lost, how solo writers are trying to rebuild it, and how writers and creators of all sorts might be able to build more enduring structures (both with each other and with their own communities) to maintain it. As always, drop me a line if you have feedback! And check out what’s on my docket here.
Part 1: Newsletters kick the media trust problem down the road.
A few months back, Gallup reported that confidence in US institutions is again down across the board, particularly for news media. Both newspapers and TV news rank in the bottom 5 institutions ordered by confidence. Only Congress ranks lower than both. There are a lot of reasons for this! I don’t have a ton of new information to add on the subject of why media confidence has declined, other than maybe recommending some people to follow if you, a person who cares about civil cohesion, want to be whipped into a frenzy of despair (frenzies of despair being a key ingredient for civil cohesion).
The more constructive question for me is: what comes next? I don’t have any data on this, but it seems clear to me that the broad decline in media trust has directly led to the rise of Substack and other direct-to-reader newsletter platforms. While they’re clearly not the whole answer to the question, newsletters are appealing from a trust perspective because they decrease the distance between a writer and her audience. In addition to making it easier to get in touch with the writers you follow—I’m emailing you! from an email you can respond to!—the more intimate culture around newsletters allows writers to be more upfront about their biases rather than maintaining a(n increasingly battered) veneer of institutional objectivity.
But you still need to kickstart that trust somewhere. Case in point: success on Substack is largely confined to traditional media defectors. Of the top paid newsletters (defined for simplicity’s sakes as those that are both on Substack’s leaderboard and are listed as having at least thousands of paying subscribers) in each of Substack’s 5 most popular categories (68 in all), at least 60% are produced by people with previous name brand media experience in their profiles. 30% regularly write about how bad traditional media is.
On one hand, this is not surprising. After all, Substack has actively courted high-profile defectors from tradition media. But on the other hand, it begs some questions for the next generation of writers and creators. If trust in media continues its downward trend, will traditional outlets still serve as a meaningful audience slingshot for new voices? And if not, where will these new entrants build the trust necessary to find an audience at all?
The remaining 29 newsletters from non-media people offer a few insights. They break down as follows:
Just over 60% (18) are professional content (e.g. PETITION’S weekly dispatch on corporate restructurings and The Pragmatic Engineer’s tech analyses) written by industry people (i.e. people who worked in the industry they’re writing about)
If you expand the ‘top’ criteria to include publications with hundreds of subscribers, this number goes up quite a bit
The remaining 10 newsletters comprise a mix of:
Anonymous writers (2) who seem like they probably come from industry.
Academics with large public personas (3) and finally
Internet people (5). I didn’t quite know how to summarize this group, other than that everyone in it has just been talking on internet for a long time: blogging, making podcasts, being. This group includes blogger Freddie deBoer and podcaster Darryl Cooper. It also includes Michael Moore, so there’s that. (The other two, since we’re basically there, are Instagram influencer Jessica Reed Kraus and Christian blogger Erin Moon)
What’s striking to me from the list of top Substackers is that, outside of the internet people and the professional content, everyone is relying on a traditional status credential (from a publication or an institution) that they’ve used to build an audience somewhere else. I think growth and engagement mechanics for writers of professional content is an interesting unsolved problem—more on that another time. But in the meantime, what about people who don’t write about expense-able subjects? What about the next Allison Romans and Suleika Jaouads? I think there’s a couple answers.
Part 2: Traditional credentialing paths aren’t going anywhere, but they’re getting weaker.
One option is that the traditional media credentialing cycle continues: Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg and David French all left significant traditional media positions to start The Dispatch, which is currently in the process of leaving Substack to become a (much smaller) center-right version of The Atlantic. And while ascending, new-ish publications like The Dispatch and Ben Smith’s Semafor have largely poached star writers from existing publications, it’s not hard to imagine a few of the more up and coming writers eventually breaking off and restarting the newsletter cycle. But as the media world becomes bifurcated between the haves (New York Times, Morning Brew) and have nots (most other traditional media brands), I think this path will get harder. It’s one thing to make your name on Fox News, which has average nightly viewership north of 1.5 million people. It’s a whole nother if, like the Dispatch, your traditional media employer has just 30 thousand subscribers.
Another option is that individual writer—the current Allisons and Suleikas—get so successful that their imprimatur and/or collaboration alone is enough to mint audience for new writers. Call this the Justin Bieber-Carly Rae Jepsen effect (or, to use a metaphor that’s both closer and older: blogrolls). In any case, my guess is that these types of one-off collabs, mentions, even longer-running cross-sells, are enough for a song of the summer, but probably not enough to drive an audience’s enduring attention.
As an added challenge, I just don’t think the future for media (or any other type of work) comprises exclusively or even mainly single-person outlets. Covid has inspired a massive rethinking of work both inside and outside the media world. The shift toward solo work is clear far beyond the massive rise in creator-driven newsletters: self employment is the only sector that has bounced back to pre-pandemic levels. And look, take it from me, a tech person who joined the Great Resignation a couple months ago: having more control over where to invest my time and with whom is great! But it’s also frequently lonely. And for creative projects, it can also be stifling.
The last option, then, is something in between.
Creators have to stick together. But their own communities might be an even bigger slingshot
I believe the media world will continue to become more fractured and that its inhabitants will continue to want to work together in enduring structures for creative, moral and material support. A lot of recent buzz has been focused on tools that allow creators to express their business relationships with each other and make it easier for them to take desired actions. CreatorDAO, for example, is a blockchain-backed collective that lets creators invest in each other—in the form of capital and in-kind services like mentorship—in exchange for a stake in other creators’ future earnings.
While the blockchain component is new, this is an old idea. At one point, multi-channel networks, which spanned the spectrum between creator-driven collectives and more vertically-integrated studios, owned or supported a significant percentage of YouTube’s most successful channels. YouTube even bought the original MCN, Next New Networks, to serve as a testing ground for the many creator-related initiatives YouTube launched over the years. On the more tactical side, there are a host of emerging tools like Contra (a freelancer marketplace) and Stir (a platform for splitting video streaming revenue among collaborators) help creative people find each other and establish business relationship.
The marketplace of tools and services enabling collaboration among creators is rapidly expanding. However, I think this focus on creator-to-creator interactions misses an important contingency when it comes to creative collaboration: the fans. These days, nobody wants just an audience; every creator, publication and brand wants a community. Brian Morrissey, who writes one of my favorite newsletters, The Rebooting, has written extensively about this topic. As creators and writers have become more focused on their most engaged fans, community management services and tools have been popping up to meet their needs. Slack, Discord and Facebook Groups have been in this game for a while and Patreon seems to be making a big push in this direction. More recently, Tribe, Uscreen, Mighty Networks, and a whole bunch of other players have all entered the ring with community tools.
From a platform’s perspective it makes sense to go this direction. Where as Substack’s email sending functionality and Patreon’s subscription management are replaceable by design (’owning your audience’ being a prime marketing message for both companies), communities are really hard to rebuild once they’ve formed in a particular location. And from a creator’s perspective, having a place to connect more frequently and more casually with the most ardent fans is a winning engagement strategy.
Where all these tools fall down is that they’re exclusively focused on enabling communication, rather than collaboration. A lot of writers I’ve talked with have told me that they get ideas on what to write, and sometimes even guest posts, through their community. Lenny’s Newsletter, one of the most popular on Substack, sources quite a bit of his content (for example, this article) through discussion in his Slack group. And while these types of community-driven articles can’t replace more in depth analyses, they can serve as a helpful augmentation on the endless, accelerating hamster wheel of content creation.
But the process for soliciting opinions from your community, turning them into something worth publishing, and given credit to your contributors is pretty heavy weight right now. If you started from the assumption that a creator’s community should be a place for creative collaboration first and communication second, as oppose to the status quo in which these are reversed, I wonder how your community management tools might look different?
Part of the reason I’m curious about collaboration-first community tools is that, in addition to helping the creator make more, better content, I believe these types of communities might also help solve the long-term mentorship problem that is inherent to the solo creator economy. While financial collectives like CreatorDAO can help align monetary incentives, I think there’s something different learned by creating under someone else’s banner when you’re first starting out. And if that helps create longer, more fruitful creative partnerships, that’s a win for everyone.
Final note: I’ve been so grateful for all the support from you all in launching this newsletter last week. THANK YOU!! As always, please reach out if you have any feedback and if you liked this one, why not subscribe? :)