>...actually, I'd VASTLY rather pay a small monthly fee to a small number of writers I care about, than a larger fee for a collection of writers that I don't.

This is the norm, I think. Surprise surprise nobody really wants the shopping channel or the landline that comes with their broadband either.

Newspapers are well aware of the threats of unbundling. It's one of the reasons why the Economist doesn't have bylines, for instance: writers have to remain a commodity.

The Economist doesn't have bylines because that wasn't really the norm at the time when they started out. Your point--that reporting shouldn't be primarily about individual credibility--does apply though.

While, in theory, picking and choosing for opinion/analysis (as opposed to news) is valid, in practice there are limits. It basically works for me with video streaming because I'm fine with having a limited number of streaming sources. I'm not sure I would be with $1/month for newsletters much less pay-per-article.

>The Economist doesn't have bylines because that wasn't really the norm at the time when they started out.

A position they held steadfast to when newspapers unionized and it became the norm. Their reliance on surprisingly young journalists (kind of like consultancy bodyshops that recruit out of uni) is one reason they were able to avoid them.

Newspapers have often been threatened by their more popular contributors leaving and taking subscribers with them.

They'd therefore never introduce bylines if they had the leverage relative to their journalists to avoid it just as McDonalds wouldnt offer free daycare if it werent struggling to hire and tech wouldnt offer free food and lavish comps.

>Your point--that reporting shouldn't be primarily about individual credibility

That doesnt seem like a point I would ever make.

I mean, you can justify it "in principle" however you like, the economics boil down to the relative leverage of management and journalists. Bylines function as an asset (reputation) that journalists can, in a sense, capitalize and gives them the leverage to take subscribers elsewhere allowing them to negotiate a greater share of the newspaper revenue (lowering profits).

How many people can name a single hard news reporter (as opposed to opinion writer or editor) at the New York Times? I couldn't and I subscribe.

Interestingly they've been shrinking their byline font size throughout the years.

I can't say I've made a study of the New York Times specifically. But there was definitely a period in the mid-2000s when it was trendy to play up the individual personalities and work of journalists, analysts, etc. At some point, organizations came to realize this wasn't mostly doing the organization any favors and this sort of thing was mostly pulled back.

They always "knew" that it hit them in the profit margin but the journalistic talent had more leverage back then, newspaper margins weren't as thin and growth prospects werent as meager.

If tech has a bad decade no doubt theyll suddenly "realize" that free breakfasts arent doing them any favors and scale them back.

The model works for you for streaming, and the same logic will apply here.

I can easily get “the news” like you have access to TV or YouTube with similar content to streaming sites. But if you want niche subjects or specific voices, then sub stack subscriptions for the niches you care about makes sense

Historically, there were (and to some degree are) a ton of physical magazines and sometimes newsletters catering to sometimes very niche content. I subscribed to a folding kayak newsletter at one point as well as various cooking/backpacking/etc. magazines.

But Substack content seems to be much more about "voices" as you put it and that I'm far less interested in.

Except the way this is shaking out is that paying a small fee for the unbundled channels (or writers, etc) you _do_ want ends up costing more than the bundle did. Not to mention the overhead of managing a million subscriptions to different companies.

The model only really works if there are 1 or 3 writers that you really want for whatever reason. But it doesn't really scale beyond that.

This reminds me of the market for DVDs, which found a big disconnect between the shows with big ratings on live TV and the shows that sold a ton of DVDs. The former tended to be anodyne comedies, the latter were niche shows with a harder edge.

When there's only three channels or a single local newspaper, you get content that is appealing or at least acceptable to the mass market. The smaller the market, the more extreme the content. When you get to the level of individual writers, I think there's an inevitable radicalization when people only pay for content that really really targets their idiosyncratic interests.

> It's one of the reasons why the Economist doesn't have bylines, for instance: writers have to remain a commodity.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim? I don’t think this is true.

Substack has 250,000 paying subscribers and its top 10 writers bring in $7m total per year, according to Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/falonfatemi/2021/01/20/the-rise...). We might guess that each subscriber pays $10/month, which would add up to $30m annual revenue.

The New York Times alone has 7m paying subscribers (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/new-york-t...). The cheapest subscription is 50c per week, so that's at least $182m revenue per year (in fact that's an introductory offer and the standard rate is four times that).

But Substack is growing! Yes, but so is NYT. In fact it signed up half a million new subscribers, double Substack's total, in the first quarter of 2020 alone (https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/the-new-york-times-success...).

Maybe the NYT is too ambitious a target. OK: the LA Times, which is "in crisis", has 356,000 digital subscribers (https://www.thewrap.com/los-angeles-times-crisis-stalled-sub...).

So, I'd say your argument is not proven yet. Wanna take a bet on when Substack total subscriptions will overtake the NYT?

6 writers you care about okay but where can investigative pieces that take months or years to create fit into that?

We’d need 10x that number, pay like 60 writers if we want to read articles that have actual research on a weekly basis, not a daily basis.

> where can investigative pieces that take months or years to create fit into that?

They don't. The problem is, they don't fit in ANYWHERE. Nobody wants to pay for that, and in fact, nobody ever has. As has been documented ad infinitum at this point, serious, long form, investigative journalism has always been cross-subsidised from other revenue streams, because at no point has their been an audience willing to pay the actual cost of investigative journalism.

Traditionally the funds came from advertising, particularly classified ads, but classified ad revenue died...what, over two decades ago now? Print advertisement revenue followed, the weird shift so many newspapers tried into video was an embarrassing disaster, and here we are, 20+ years of flailing later and no replacements visible.

Will Substack solve this? Absolutely not. Hell, by continuing the great unbundling it might make it worse by undermining the revenue stream for the 2-3 newspapers still trying to make a go of it.

Which is, ultimately, my point: Your argument seems to be "unbundling will fail, because it won't pay for the high quality journalism people want". My argument is "unbundling will succeed, because people don't want to pay for high quality journalism".

No my argument isn’t that substack will fail, my point is that if it succeeds it will be deleterious to society by further defunding real journalism, which is barely funded. Like you say, very few newspapers are doing real, long term investigate reporting. Usually they win pulitzers when they actually do.

And substack is just another platform for people with grudges and conspiracy theories to promote themselves on.