I'm sure we had one or two journo lads lurking around these parts. I wanted to ask the both of you about Substack.
With the way that journalism has changed over the last twenty or thirty years, is it ethical to spring for a Substack subscription to read a few writers I like, or am I contributing to the death of journalism? How much are Substack skimming off the top? How likely are they to enshittify the service after baiting in enough users with other people's hard work?
Obviously the subscription is worth it to me personally because I like these writers and am bothering to ask the question, I'm talking more about whether it's a good or bad thing for the industry as a whole.
>>41533 A thing that's worth remembering is that some portion of your subscription through Substack goes to the writer(s) you support through it, while another portion of your subcription goes towards paying alt-right shitheads hundreds of thousands of dollars to attract them to the same platform your writer(s) of choice effectively had to write for free for until they had a decent number of subscribers.
>>41535 Yes and no. On the one hand, you're paying for the whole thing either way. On the other, it's a matter of cross-subsidy. The theoretical advantage of a newspaper is that Hopkins gets the deranged loonies to part with their money to read her ravings, then that money is used to subsidise the real journalism that mature adults like ourselves enjoy, which is usually a money-loser.
Once you're in the internet age the loonies don't have to buy the whole anymore and the money-men can see all too clearly the analytics data showing Hopkins is the money spinner, so you can cut the serious reporting down to stenography for the powerful so long as people continue to click on her articles. The cross-subsidy of it all being packaged in one physical paper breaks down almost completely.
