Substack is changing the nature of journalism, reporting, blogging, podcasting, and content creation. Strikingly, it is turning a generation of content creators and journalists into business owners.

Newspapers used to have local monopolies or oligopolies. This was changed by the Internet, where it was suddenly easy to use any news source from any geography. Later, social networks like Twitter and Facebook built massive audiences and drove more news distribution and interaction.

Newspapers & magazines had enormous costs associated with printing presses and the physical production and distribution of their content. Digital media emerged without these baked in costs

Convert Twitter or other followers into regular subscribers and readers by building a direct channel outside of Twitter or other social media gatekeepers. It also allows for targeted niche writing.

A subset of journalists can make 2X-20X more on substack than at their old job.

Media brands will continue to thrive, but we will also see a blossoming of individual brands and niche publications that are self sustaining.

It also creates a direct financial incentive for writers on the platform to build their userbase and readership by giving them revenue tied directly to usage.

Ads based models are less able to incentivize content providers directly, nor do they create an entirely new media business model like Substack does.

One of the challenges of local news was its cost structure. Each paper needed to physically produce papers, sell inventory to advertisers, and distribute.

While the old paradigm of journalism was “get on the front page”, Substack is an interesting move towards “get in the inbox”.

Society is moving from public to private content and mainstream to new fragmented niches. Part of this shift is driven by a fear of cancel culture, which appears to be evident in the newsrooms for a subset of journalists who shifted to Substack.

Given Twitter’s increasing censorship, erm I mean, "content moderation", of scientific and political content, it will be interesting to see the trade off between censorship and distribution reach.

One of the most interesting societal transformations driven by Substack is converting a generation of journalists into small (and in some cases large) business owners. During the last two decades, journalists have suffered from the “creative destruction” aspects of capitalism - where the business model of their platforms were hurt and many journalists were laid off.

It will be interesting to see how this adoption of direct business ownership shapes the writing and thinking of a generation of writers - and might end up being one of the biggest societal impacts of Substack.