How Substack Stacks Up
In five short years Substack has morphed from a platform for little-known writers to a big media player luring marquee names from newspapers and magazines. With many Substackers now earning big bucks from the newsletter platform, could the humble newsletter present new opportunities for PR professionals. Christian Koch investigates.
The freeloading freelance hack is a trope nearly all PR professionals will be familiar with. They’re the canapé-thieves at your launch party, poised by the kitchen door ready to plunder the tray of satay skewers for their evening meals; the journalists rarely seen in clothes other than that promo T-shirt you sent them a few years back.
Journalism isn’t a well-paid profession, true. But if some of these skint scribes have been a little quiet lately, check whether they’ve got an email newsletter on Substack, the $650m/£478m-valued San Francisco-based newsletter platform that has amassed over one million paid subscribers since launching in 2017.
Instead of scrabbling for word rates that haven’t changed since 1997, these writers could now be delivering posts directly to readers’ inboxes, charging them £5-a-month to do so. They might be a long way off from earning the $1m/£740,000 figures reportedly pocketed by US political commentators Matt Taibbi and Matt Yglesias on the platform, but with only Substack’s 10% cut and a small credit card fee to deal with, the low overhead costs of running an email newsletter are clearly luring many journalists across from traditional media.
Former Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore is there with ‘Letters from Suzanne’, as is Daily Mail rabble-rouser Melanie Philips and the journalists behind, which reinvented it as The New Cue newsletter shortly after the venerable music magazine folded due to pressures of publishing during the pandemic.
They join the likes of whistleblower Edward Snowden, filmmaker Michael Moore, and ex-Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings who treats his thousands of £10-a-month paying premium subscribers (you do the maths) to his innermost thoughts on everything from quantum computing to whether former boss Boris Johnson is fit to be PM. Big-name authors are joining the party too, such as Fight Club writer Chuck Palahniuk and Salman Rushdie, who has been serialising latest novella The Seventh Wave on the platform. The recent introduction of podcasts and videos may also see broadcasters leaping across too.
There will be a future for journalists where they make a good living and don’t see their work spiked. This is where I want to be.
Future Proofing
Award-winning editor Farrah Storr is another journalistic convert. Prior to joining Substack as the UK’s head of writer partnerships last November (she also has her own Things Worth Knowing newsletter on Substack), Storr had spent the last decade working as editor-in-chief of Hearst titles Cosmopolitan and Women’s Health and most recently Elle UK which posted a rise in circulation in the last year of her tenure. The penny dropped during the pandemic when she realised she was “spending more time and money subscribing to Substack newsletters than on magazines… I thought, ‘There will be a future for journalists where they make a good living and don’t see their work spiked. This is where I want to be.’”
Part of Storr’s role is to find new voices; she’s particularly excited about Substack’s potential to promote writers from underrepresented backgrounds on the platform, something not always possible with the talent pipelines of traditional media. “When I was on magazines it frustrated me that [talent was limited] to those coming from working-for-free work placements and postgraduate journalism courses – that not everybody can afford to do. Now there’s an opportunity for all those people who previously thought writing wasn’t a possibility for them… Anybody can go on Substack.”
For those writers who have nurtured a sizeable social media following, Storr believes Substack gives them a chance to scale this into “mini-media empire where they could sell books or T-shirts one day”.
“With many journalists, I look at their Instagram and social media accounts and they’re giving so much [content] away for free,” she adds. “That’s fine, but once they leave that social media platform, they lose that community overnight. With Substack, journalists have their emails and are in direct contact with them. They are your tribe.”
News World Order
Substack isn’t the only newsletter platform: Twitter acquired Revue last year, Meta (Facebook) has Bulletin, while upstart Ghost has even snared defectors from Substack. And of course, the concept of email newsletters isn’t new either: Gwyneth Paltrow’s $250m/£183m lifestyle brand, Goop, started as a newsletter in 2008, while ex-Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s Air Mail does a roaring trade informing readers about luxury news and reviews ranging from the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc and Tom Ford.
However, it’s Substack that can offer real opportunity for British PRs thanks to its unique synthesis of direct-to-reader relationships and cornucopia of niche subjects – its eclectic ecosystem spans newsletters on topics such as bankruptcy, parenting, praying, salads, TikTok trends, medieval English women, human-animal relationships and… leaf-blowing.
The people who do well on Substack tend to have a niche; they’re experts in something.
“The people who do well on Substack tend to have a niche; they’re experts in something,” says Storr. “If you’re a PR dealing with gardening equipment, find the person writing about leaf-blowing! There are huge audiences for these things, but nobody writing about them… Leaf-blowing won’t ever be viral, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an audience for it.”
Storr’s advice for PRs is to “talk to the person behind the newsletter and do direct business with them, finding out how you can work with their newsletter… Relationships are what PRs do best and this is where it comes into play.”
Prize giveaways would work too, while Storr can envisage press trips becoming a feature of journalists’ newsletters too.
Writers could be receptive to PRs pitching them, particularly if their reservoir of ideas runs dry. “When you’re not working in the magazine environment and constantly hearing about the latest thing, you can sometimes feel out of the loop,” says Storr. “PRs should absolutely be pitching what’s hot and new to their favourite Substack writers; it’s a no-brainer.”
Substack also has a rigid ‘no adverts’ rule. While this guarantees editorial independence for writers, it can also mean that sponsored content can be something of a nebulous area.
The somewhat foggy metrics available on Substack may confuse PRs too. Rather than providing a precise number of subscribers for newsletters, it gives a ballpark figure of “hundreds” or “thousands”. There are no publicly available analytics on email open rates or clicks either, meaning it’s often at the discretion of the writer to reveal this data (however, Storr promises “more granular analytics will be coming”).
Substack doesn’t believe in censorship… unless it’s criminal or inciting hate, we let readers decide what to want to read.
Substack also has a hands-off moderation strategy (Storr: “Substack doesn’t believe in censorship… unless it’s criminal or inciting hate, we let readers decide what to want to read”), which has led to accusations the medium is becoming a playground for controversial voices regularly de-platformed from social media – it currently hosts newsletters from the likes of Father Ted creator Graham Linehan (whose Twitter account has been closed for anti-trans views) and ex-New York Times reporter Alex Berenson (banned from Twitter for pushing Covid misinformation claims). In January, it was revealed anti-vaccine authors were making $2.5m/£1.85m a year by publishing newsletters on Substack, according to research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
With no editor to reshape copy or professional fact-checkers to ensure legally dubious claims aren’t being made (Substack does provide legal advice through its Defender program), it means newsletter writers could feasibly churn out 4,000-word stream-of-consciousness diatribes (anybody read Dominic Cummings' newsletters recently?) or content littered with bad grammar and punctuation mistakes.
Still, it’s a small rap-sheet, especially when many writers on the platform enthuse about how they’ve been given a financial lifeline and an enthusiastic audience who value their craft. Writers aren’t immune from sharing personal details either, such as journalist Anna Wharton who detailed her account of physical and emotional abuse from her ex-husband, Bluetones’ singer Mark Morriss (allegations he denies).
Local Hero?
Email newsletters might even lead to the unthinkable: reviving the regional press. The 21st-century hasn’t been kind to local newspapers, which has seen plunging print sales, plus Google and Facebook digital ad revenue decimating their classified-ads based business model. But newsletters offer a new way of raising revenue. Reach (publishers of the Mirror, Express and 110 regional titles) has seen four million people sign up to 250 emails that go out each week. Meanwhile, in Manchester, The Mill is an email newspaper on Substack run by ex-broadsheet journalist Joshi Herriman, applauded for reporting and investigating local stories and picking up thousands of subscribers readers paying £7-a-month.
Whether it’s The Mill or a bored freelance writer sat at home firing tweets into the ether, Substack offers a chance to commodify their words and become media brands themselves: perfect for today’s personality-based online economy.
“The hope is writers don’t just write newsletters, they have their own business empire,” says Storr. “For me, it would absolutely be the hope there would be a mini-Gwyneth writing a wellness newsletter in their bedroom that could become the next Goop one day.”
For PRs, the time to ferret out these writers is now.