Amidst rapid change and disruption, the news media industry needs a radical rethink, according to Hamish McKenzie, Substack co-founder and chief writing officer.

“We’re in a moment of massive transition,” McKenzie said during this week’s INMA Webinar, Subscription Masters with Substack: Unlocking individual media creators’ success.

“The Internet started a media disruption that ended up challenging and ultimately completely undermining the business models that have held up traditional media for a couple of hundred years before that.”

The traditional media model has been replaced by “a social media system that has given us a world of chaos,” he said.

McKenzie and Greg Piechota, lead of the INMA Readers First Initiative, looked at how the publishing model has changed and what that means to the industry.

Inside the Substack infrastructure

Founded in 2017 as a way for writers to publish their own e-mail newsletters and get paid through subscriptions, Substack has emerged as a powerful tool for writers. But McKenzie pointed out that his company differs dramatically from legacy media companies: “We’re not in competition with other publications,” he explained, noting Substack is a platform that hosts publications.

Through that infrastructure, individual writers (or small teams) are provided the tools to launch and monetise their own publications. Substack lets writers own their audience relationships, their e-mail lists, and their revenue, taking a 10% cut of paid subscriptions in return for offering multi-format publishing tools for text, audio, video, and community engagement.

“We see ourselves as being in service to a new generation of publishers,” he said.

McKenzie drew comparisons to YouTube, with some notable differences: Whilst YouTube aggregates and centralises the relationship between content creators and audiences, Substack decentralises it.

“[We] make sure that the publishers continue to own their relationships with their audiences, and we’re based around direct subscriptions to those publishers,” he clarified. And, unlike YouTube, Substack is a multi-format platform that embraces text, audio, and video.

A hands-off approach

Substack is accessible to any creator who wants to start a newsletter, and the platform has made it easy to start a new publication. The main requirement is that creators must follow the content guidelines. As long as the content doesn’t incite violence, spread spam, or violate a few other basic guidelines, it’s allowed to exist on the platform — even if it promotes extreme or unpopular views.

This approach works, McKenzie said, because publishers only succeed by cultivating loyal readers — not grabbing the fleeting attention that comes with inflammatory posts: “Social media rewards the content that causes division. The Substack approach … rewards the types of behaviours and content that nurture relationships.”

Because of that, Substack naturally encourages constructive, relationship-driven content, and users are looking for more truth, less sensationalisation: “It feels qualitatively different from other platforms,” McKenzie said. “And we think this approach is going to produce better outcomes for culture and for media.” 

Finding a path forward

Whilst some content creators have found almost immediate success with this model, it isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme.

Piechota mentioned journalist Michael McLeod, creator of a successful Substack about local news in Edinburgh. His newsletter, The Edinburgh Minute, has amassed 20,000 free subscribers and nearly 3,000 paid ones — generating over US$198,000 a year in revenue.

“That’s five times the average salary for a local journalist in the UK,” noted Piechota.

And McLeod is just one example. Local news startups are sprouting across Substack, often replacing legacy outlets that have shut down or gone weekly.

“It’s not enough yet to replace what we’ve lost,” McKenzie admitted. “But 10,000 journalists like Michael could form the foundation of a new local news ecosystem.”

However, it’s not as simple as opening an account and watching the money roll in. As with the launch of any business, McKenzie said “it’s helpful if you don’t need to make money for six months,” and suggested having a benefactor or “a way to make money from day one” to allow time to gain traction.

Then, creators must pick a lane, essentially, and decide the best fit for them: “Pick a niche that you really are interested in and can imagine yourself covering for on a day-to-day basis for a very long time,” McKenzie advised. “People will feel your interest in that area. [But] don’t make it too broad and don’t make it too narrow.”

Building trust in a new space

Substack content creators cover a broad range of topics, and many of the most successful ones were already trusted voices before they joined the platform, such as American historian and Yale professor Timothy Snyder and former Wall Street Journal and New York Times journalist Bari Weiss.

Others, like U.S.-based political historian Heather Cox Richardson, have built a massive following on Facebook that has translated to subscriptions through Substack.

What it comes down to, particularly in an age of rampant misinformation, is being trustworthy and providing a personal voice rather than an institutional voice.

“In a lot of cases, people come to Substack turning to voices they trust. In many cases … they’re looking to make sense of the news. So they’re turning to these individuals or teams or news organisations who can help them interpret the news, make sense of what’s going on in the world,” McKenzie said.

Many people feel they’ve been lied to — a direct consequence of the Internet disrupting media, McKenzie said — and that’s leading to them seeking out new sources of information. It provides Substack content creators with both an opportunity to reach new audiences.

“In this chaos environment where people can talk back and they expect to see their perspective represented, I think it’s a great advantage to be able to speak frankly and without hiding your motives directly to the audiences,” he said. “I think that that’s something for news organisations, old or new, to keep in mind: that speaking directly and frankly is an advantage, not a disadvantage, in this new system.”

The new media vision

As newsrooms shrink and creators go independent, more discussions are turning to how news media companies will move forward.

Piechota shared a recent conversation with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, in which Döpfner suggested that the model for news media companies in the future will be more like a record label instead of a traditional newspaper. The goal: to support talent instead of owning it.

This vision includes offering freelancers and creators the kinds of support traditionally provided by employers — editing, legal advice, production, marketing, etc. — without taking ownership of their work or audience.

“I love this vision,” McKenzie said. “I think the fundamental reorientation for news organisations in this era is to think of themselves as not owning talent but supporting and uplifting talent and to put themselves in service of that talent, and then surround that talent with an array of useful services that will help make their work better and help their success greater — and then sharing that success rather than exploiting that success.”

Creating an environment where creators become colleagues and have the opportunity to share ideas, encourage each other’s work, and even offer best practices for generating revenue or building audiences: “The key is to support the talent rather than own the talent,” McKenzie said. “Then new things become possible.”

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