The advertising model is widely cited as a major reason for the decline in quality of online news, but it’s not clear that subscriptions are any better in the long run.
An anti-advertising argument goes something like this:
- Online advertising performance is measured in terms of ad impressions (each time an ad shows on a page).
- Ad impression counts are largely correlated with page views.
- More page views means more ad impressions, so short salaciously titled articles are the most effective way to accumulate page views.
- Thus, the online ad model incentivizes clickbait and low quality reporting.
The natural reaction is to focus on subscriptions as a path towards supporting sustainable high quality writing. I think there’s something to this argument — many respected outfits like the FT, WSJ, and Washington Post are effectively subscription only. But let’s not fall prey to the argument that a subscription model necessarily results in high quality reporting. I would argue instead that quality comes from the willingness to accept critical feedback, and a crucial question is how an organization or individual preserves that feedback loop. From this framing, it’s not obvious to me that ad vs subscription is a comparison that makes sense. We should be incentivizing critical feedback, not popularity.
Part of the function of a news organization is precisely to provide this feedback. I’ll pause for a moment here and say that if your instinct is to automatically believe no such feedback process exists in mainstream media news outlets, be it NYT, WaPo, or Fox, then you’ve been polarized and are simply not in touch with reality.
The degree of feedback effectiveness varies depending on other institutional pressures and incentives, so it’s also not correct to say that a feedback loop forces correctness. That said, which kind of organization is most likely to get stories right, one with flawed feedback or one with zero feedback? I would put my money on the former.
Now, what about the spate of high profile writers who’ve left traditional newsrooms and made their way to Substack? From this framework, we should ask — what is the feedback mechanism that keeps them honest? One argument might be that if Jack’s Substack begins veering into crazy land then Jill’s Substack can counter those arguments. But if Jack and Jill’s respective audiences are distinct from each other, there’s no incentive for either to check each other’s work in good faith. I have no data on how many people subscribe to both Bari Weiss and Matt Yglesias (just to pick a pair out of thin air), but I’ll guess it’s a rounding error. In contrast, the number of people who read both Fox and NYT is quite large, and there’s a substantial amount of cross reporting.
Stepping back, suppose I were to ask you to design a media environment which nurtures the most rigorously debated and fact checked news. Would your answer be: we should move towards single writer gated subscriptions? I’m having a hard time imagining a structure that would work better than institutions with editorial capacity participating in the free flow of discourse.
Also of concern are the staggering dollar amounts due to Substack, $1M for some writers. A reasonable career strategy is now:
- Start writing for a high reputation news organization and build an audience on social media.
- Generate controversy that attracts ideologically oriented fans.
- Leave said news org and create a Substack.
We’ve seen multiple people fall into this mold, though I wouldn’t go so far as to assign any kind of bad intent on their part. It works! My worry is it works too well.
