As a writer who goes after very powerful people, how does that affect your work in terms of these financiers/banks trying to pressure you or your employers. Are tools like Substack designed to help writers stay independent?
I think that's definitely going to be a major motivation for journalists going forward. The media landscape is becoming more and more rigid and it is becoming harder to challenge certain points through the old networks and newspapers. So having reporters be financially independent would be huge for investigative reporting, which is one of the areas that has been cut the most in the new era of clickbait media.
Another thing -- what Substack is trying to do is to solve a problem that has existed in media forever. Writers of all types have always been compensated in an indirect, convoluted way, by publishers who get some or all of their revenue from ads. This forces writers to address audiences through layers of middlemen who may or may not want to meddle in the material. The Substack model could end both direct and indirect censorship.
This is definitely part of our motivation for making Substack. When readers pay writers directly, the writers are accountable to those readers, and not e.g. advertisers.
From an investigative journalism standpoint, hypothetically, do you envision soft releases to your paid subscribers followed by syndicating(?) the greater story to traditional outlet?
>The Substack model could end both direct and indirect censorship.
There will come the inevitable time when Substack will be pressured to censor/boot content creators for all of the usual reasons, especially if it becomes the home of a new investigative journalism model. Does Substack have any particular commitments/limits regarding content?
I like to think the paywalled feedback loop between creators/readers can help isolate controversial journalism topics from drive-by scrutiny by provocateurs of all politics.
