I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the actual nitty-gritty of what it means to produce independent journalism in the post-Twitter world — not the big picture stuff, the what-does-it-all-mean of it all, but just the actual grind of writing and promoting and writing and promoting and writing and promoting. The endless quest for eyeballs.

For my latest, I’m in DAME Magazine unpacking the “a-la-carte-ification” of news (my editor’s term, editors are great, more people should have them and not enough people do, because here we are all grinding away alone behind our little blogs). Here’s an excerpt:

Precarity has become the default mode for media workers, with industry jobs disappearing faster than ever. There’s a reason more and more newsrooms are unionizing; folks lucky enough to work on staff these days are being pushed to produce more content with fewer resources and diminishing job security. Attacks on the free press are proliferating across the country, and journalists, especially those from marginalized backgrounds or who cover extremism, have been threatened with increasing frequency (and even vilified in the right-wing press). It’s no wonder we’re seeking out self-run publishing opportunities amid a media landscape in tremendous upheaval.

And newslettering seems especially attractive following the death of Twitter, which has sent folks like me, who once built sizable followings on the platform, scrambling for ways to reach our now-scattered communities. Substack is perhaps the best-known among the new crop of newsletter hosts, but there’s also Buttondown, Ghost and Beehiiv in addition to old(er) services like Medium, MailChimp, and Squarespace, “creator” funding sites like Ko-Fi and Patreon, and internet-geriatric blogging sites like WordPress. Practically all of them would have us believe not just that newslettering is the future of journalism, but that the prospect of getting paid real money for everything from our stray thoughts to deeply researched independent reporting is available to all, and just a few clicks away.

But there’s a price we all pay for the a-la-carte-ification of news and commentary, and it’s more than the sum total of our many and various $5 monthly subscriptions. Journalism—good journalism for sure, but even run-of-the-mill stuff—is costly and time-consuming. Hours spent covering everything from Congress to city council meetings, shelling out for court documents, and renting cars and hotel rooms to meet sources all add up quickly. There are a few writers who have big-enough followings and/or a solid-enough savings cushion to strike out on their own and succeed from the jump, but many of us are looking at putting in full-time work for a tenth-of-the-time pay (if that). Some platforms, notably Substack, offer attractive advances and editorial support, but usually to a tier of higher-profile journalists who could already succeed without it. It’s an enormous gamble for the average reporter to bet on making anything resembling a living by cheerily squeezing subscribers for a few dollars at a time.

As a result, the indie newsletter model as it exists today predominantly supports three kinds of work: commentary, aggregation, and right-wing outrage.

I hope you’ll head over to DAME and read the whole thing, but I’ll add a few more thoughts here. I realize there is some irony in sending a newsletter about the limitations of pay-for-perks, subscription-based newslettering, but here we are. It’s on a lot of independent writers’ and creators’ minds these days. I found this meta-commentary from the king of the old(ish)-school internet, Jason Kottke, to be a particularly astute distillation of why I moved away from a pay-for-perks model when I left Substack. The OP is Siderea, who writes:

What I want to do is write openly on the internet where anyone can read what I write. Where what I write can be cited by anyone who wants to refer to it in any internet discussion.

The audience of my writing is not my patrons, and it is not just the people who pay me for it. It’s the whole world.

And that, quite explicitly, is what my patrons pay me to do.

Yeah, that. ☝🏼. Basically that. That used to be how just about any journalist could approach their work. The newspaper, the magazine, the publishers — it was their job, specifically and on purpose, to worry about subscribers and advertisements and keeping the lights on and how much to charge for x or y or z. We writers, we could just … write. Follow the story. Sure, you wanted eyes on your work, so you wanted a snappy headline and a good lead, but that’s because most of us didn’t want to write for empty rooms. We were writing to fill up rooms. The work was supposed to speak for itself; the business was supposed to stay business — on that side of the building, with the people who wore business casual every day and got to their desks at 9 or 10am and clocked the hell out at 5 or 6pm.

Paid newslettering is the worst of both worlds, though the newsletter platforms would have us believe it isn’t. They would have us believe that the Substacks and the Substack-imitators are handling the “business side” so that we can just focus on writing, only writing, as if we need be nothing more than opalesque bodies, draped in gauzy robes, gazing thoughtfully at the garden below, every once in a while coughing a delicate, consumptive cough before returning to our pen and ink. But that’s not how it works at all. There’s a reason newsletter platforms push stats and analytics on writers. A reason why they all churn out “how-to” content for writers — like, prodigious amounts of this kind of content — meant to convince us that there couldn’t be anything simpler than starting our own paid newsletters! (If it were really so easy, would we need … all of this?) There’s a reason it’s incumbent on creators to shill for the monthly subscriptions, to create perks for annual subscribers who go above and beyond. The newsletter publishers aren’t doing any of that for us, for you, for me. They’re not in-house publishers, agents, or administrators, or business managers co-supporting creators so that all we have to think about are stringing sentences together.

They’re landlords. But it’s somehow also our job to build and maintain their property.

Related/unrelated, tech writer Katie Notopoulos has a piece in the MIT Technology Review published today that also optimistically considers the niche-ification of the present-and-future-Web. An excerpt:

The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy. 

I like the “more internet” idea. I especially like the “more internet” idea if we’re talking about more indie internet — more little blogs, more niche Discords and Slacks, more message boards and localized e-commerce. Less everybody-has-a-Facebook, everybody-has-a-Substack, everybody-has-an-Instagram.

Maybe I’m just an internet-old who misses the world wide web of my youth. The up-hill-both-ways of it all; when you had to know at least a little HTML to get your blog up and running. I don’t know. Hey, drag-and-drop and WYSIWYG is great. There are lots of reasons why today’s out-of-the-box internet experience is a more diverse, accessible place. But there’s a price we pay for it. I’m not sure we know what it is yet.

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