Latest news with #HamishMcKenzie
The Guardian
a day ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Washington Post in talks with Substack about using its writers
The Washington Post has held talks with Substack about hosting pieces by its writers, the site's co-founder has said, as a host of legacy media brands embrace the newsletter platform in the battle for readers. In an interview with the Guardian, Substack's Hamish McKenzie said he had spoken to the Post about its plans to widen the types of opinion pieces on its website. He said there had been a 'change in mindset' from traditional media, which once viewed Substack with suspicion. He said many now saw the platform as an opportunity to adapt to what he described as 'the most significant media disruption since the printing press'. UK news companies including the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and Reach, which publishes the Daily Mirror, have all launched newsletters on Substack. McKenzie said the Post had approached Substack about hosting its writers. 'We've talked to them, but there's no formal agreement or partnership, and they wouldn't need to talk to us to be able to go out and attempt to do those things,' McKenzie said. 'They need to persuade the writers, creators, the journalists, publishers, not us. 'If they're helping to bring more exposure to those writers and drive audiences to them, if it's designed in that way – and I'm not 100% sure what the ultimate outcome is going to be – that could be really good for everyone.' Substack has become increasingly influential since its launch in 2017. It allows anyone to publish and distribute digital content, primarily through newsletters, and charge a subscription. It has also been branching out into podcasts and video. The potential tie-up comes after Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Post, provoked its comment editor to walk out after he announced its comment pages would be more narrowly focused on pieces that supported and defended 'personal liberties' and 'free markets'. The move was seen as an attempt by Bezos to safeguard his relationship with President Trump. However, the Post – under its British chief executive and publisher, Will Lewis – is trying to find other ways of drawing in readers following reported losses of $100m (£74m) last year, including a project to host comment pieces from other sources on its website. Reach has launched dozens of Substacks this year alone, covering topics from book trends to Liverpool FC. The Telegraph has just started to post content on a royal family Substack, while the Daily Mail has a Substack dedicated to showbiz news. 'All of a sudden really, a bunch of legacy news organisations are trying to see how they can take advantage of Substack,' McKenzie said. 'That's a really welcome change in mindset. At first people looked at us as if we were a curious instrument and then they started to look at us as maybe we were a threat, because some talent would prefer to go independent on Substack rather than be in a newsroom. 'People are starting to understand that Substack is not just a publishing system that helps people make money, but it's also a network and it represents new land to build on, where new media products can be born and built. Legacy institutions can build those just as well as newcomers. It's a big opportunity era.' He said Substack was supposed to be a 'disruptor of social media', rather than the traditional media, allowing longer writing instead of viral content. He said he had 'no regrets whatsoever' about having resisted overtures from Elon Musk to buy the site. McKenzie said Substack was trying to find new workable models for media amid the struggles of traditional outlets to hold on to rapidly fragmenting audiences. 'It's not a problem with demand for quality journalism,' he said. 'It's a problem with the business model and so there has to be a reinvention. We're almost at the point where the fire has razed through the forest and there are a few trees still standing. It's time to replant the forest. We're living through the most significant media disruption since the printing press.' Substack allows anyone to create digital content, which then sits on a dedicated website and can be sent directly to the inboxes of subscribers. It has also branched out into audio and video features in an attempt to benefit from the podcast boom. Crucially, it allows writers to charge a subscription for some or all of their pieces. The ability to monetise content has allowed some established writers to break away from traditional titles and go it alone. According to an analysis by the Press Gazette, the number of Substack newsletters with at least $500,000 (£369,000) in annual subscriptions revenue alone has doubled in two years. Some of the writers on the site have become influential in US politics, including Bari Weiss and Matt Yglesias. In the UK, it has provided a platform for new local news sites where newspapers have disappeared from the map or had their reporting staff significantly cut back. New ventures include The Manchester Mill, launched by the journalist Joshi Herrmann, and London Centric, launched by the former Guardian journalist, Jim Waterson.
New York Times
10-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
How Much Are We Paying for Newsletters? $50, $100 … How About $3,000 a Year.
Em Hermann-Johnson had been following Anne Helen Petersen's writing for years when, in 2020, Ms. Petersen quit her job at BuzzFeed News to write her newsletter, Culture Study, full time. 'I didn't hesitate to support her,' Ms. Hermann-Johnson, a 52-year-old substitute teacher in Minneapolis, said. She paid $5 a month for a Culture Study subscription. It would be the first of many. 'I don't even know how many I pay for right now,' she said. 'Five, maybe? Six?' When she sat down to determine the actual number, it turned out to be 11. She pays between $5 and $10 a month for some and between $38 and $60 annually for others, totaling about $600 a year, she said. In the last few years, more people are spending a significant amount of money on email newsletters from their favorite writers. As a result, some have also fallen into a familiar budgeting trap: It can be difficult to keep track of how many newsletters they've signed up for and how much they're paying for them. Despite the surprise, Ms. Hermann-Johnson didn't consider culling her list. As she read through her paid newsletters — among them from Nora McInerny, a grief writer; Laura McKowen, a sobriety writer; and Catherine Newman, a memoirist and novelist — there were no surprises. All were writers she read, loved and felt good about giving money to. 'I just want to support them and their work, and that's how I feel like I can do it,' she said. A Relatively New Spending Category Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack's founders, wrote in a Substack post last year that Ben Thompson, a tech analyst who writes the blog Stratechery, had inspired an early version of his company. Mr. Thompson added a paid membership option to his blog in 2014, and within six months, 1,000 subscribers were paying him at least $100 a year for premium content. (Mr. Thompson refers to his own publication as a 'subscription-based blog, newsletter and podcast.') When Mr. McKenzie founded Substack with his colleagues Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi in 2017, their first recruit to the platform was Bill Bishop, whose free newsletter, Sinocism, had 30,000 subscribers. On his first day publishing it on Substack, he brought in $100,000 in subscriptions. Substack, then as now, took 10 percent. Today, many platforms and products, including Beehiiv, Kit, Memberful, Ghost, Lede and Patreon, help writers create paid publications. But Substack is widely considered to be the largest, with over 50,000 revenue-earning publications. The company reports that it has tens of millions of active subscribers and five million paid subscriptions. It declined to share concrete subscriber numbers, including the number of paid subscribers. Because the category is relatively new, there isn't enough public data yet on who is paying for newsletters, or how many they are paying for. Dan Oshinsky, founder of Inbox Collective, a newsletter consultancy, said the desire to support a particular person's work sets the newsletter category apart from more traditional media subscriptions, where access to the content itself is the primary driver to subscribe. 'When there is a person behind it or a small team behind it, readers will go, 'I really like you, I like your mission, I like your work, and I want to make sure that I support you in some way,'' Mr. Oshinsky said. Jill Krupnik, a 42-year-old writer in Brooklyn who said she paid for five newsletters, described her own primary driver as a desire to help 'the people I'm in a parasocial relationship with.' Not Keeping Track In conversations with over 40 readers who pay for at least one subscription to an independent email newsletter or blog, many said they did not know exactly how many newsletters they were paying for or even how to check, save some tedious bank statement forensics. On Substack, for example, subscribers can see a list of publications they pay for, but not a full count. They also must click through individual invoices to see how much they are paying — a total is not available. Of those subscribers who did check, many discovered that the total was more than they had thought. Sari Botton, who lives in Kingston, N.Y., makes her living from two publications on Substack: Oldster Magazine and Memoir Land. She keeps her core content free, inviting readers who can to subscribe for $50 to $55 each year. 'I'm really uncomfortable asking for money,' she said. But she has no such qualms paying other writers. 'I just want to help everybody,' Ms. Botton, 59, said. 'I definitely subscribe to more than I can read on a regular basis.' When she counted them, she found she was paying for 127 newsletters — all on Substack. 'I was stunned,' she said. 'In my mind, it was more like 35 or maybe even 50. I'm really bad at keeping track of expenses and my credit card charges.' Ms. Botton settled in to make some hard decisions to cull her list. The easiest unsubscribes: writers who charged her despite not publishing on a regular basis. She estimates she now pays about $3,000 a year for about 60 newsletters. 'I want to help people who are writers, who are going through what we're all going through: the decimation of our entire field,' she said. Paying Attention Some subscribers know exactly whom they are paying for, and even develop systems to spread their dollars around. Phyllis Unterschuetz, 76, is a retiree in Atlanta. 'My husband and I are living on Social Security, which does not reach,' she said. She answers paid online surveys to fund her newsletter subscriptions and can earn enough to afford three to five at a time. When she feels it's time to rotate to another publication, she sends a note to explain that she is canceling not because of the content but because she needs to free up dollars to support other writers. Brian Keaney, a teacher in Worcester, Mass., said he had paid for three publications from independent journalists on Substack for several years, including How Things Work, by Hamilton Nolan ($50 a year), and Worcester Sucks and I Love It, by Bill Shaner ($69 a year). In the last month, he added three paid subscriptions with funds he redistributed after adjusting his longtime Boston Globe subscription from print to digital. 'If I had unlimited funds, I'd pay for all the Substacks I read,' Mr. Keaney, 61, said. 'I'm a firm believer that if you're putting in quality work, you deserve to get paid.' For her 50th birthday two years ago, Bianca Spence, an arts administrator in Toronto, bought herself a $50 annual subscription to Culture Study after a few years as a free subscriber. It was her first time paying for a newsletter, and her next two weren't such slow burns. She began paying $5 a month for That Shakespearean Rag, by the literary critic Steven W. Beattie, 'the second he started charging,' she said, since she had read him for free for so long. When Jane Pratt, founder of the cult teen magazine Sassy, started a newsletter called Another Jane Pratt Thing, Ms. Spence immediately paid $80 a year for it. 'I still have all my old Sassy magazines and Jane magazines in a box in my closet,' Ms. Spence, 52, said. 'I would follow Jane to the end of the earth.' Conducting an Audit Aminatou Sow, author of the Crème de la Crème newsletter, recently did an audit of the ones she was paying for. 'I am trying to be a financially responsible person,' Ms. Sow, 40, said. Part of that work: whittling down her paid subscriptions. 'I feel bad saying that out loud, because I feel like I should say that I pay for all of them,' she said. 'But I don't.' One way she cut back: bartering with other writers. 'I think, in general, artists should do that with each other,' she said. 'And people can say no, and that's fine.' Comped swaps have drastically lowered the number of newsletters she pays for to a single digit. For subscribers who can't barter, Ms. Sow recommends the hard audit. 'People are hoarding digital products, drinking from a fire hose of this content,' she said. 'Do you really need to subscribe to 100 newsletters? I don't think so. Do you need to subscribe to 20 of them? I'm not even sure.' Ms. Sow puts about half of her content behind a paywall and charges paid subscribers $50 a year. 'I think that's a good barrier of entry for everybody,' she said. A few weeks after our initial discussion, Ms. Hermann-Johnson's 11 paid subscriptions had increased to 15. Here's how it happened. First, one of her favorite writers joined Substack, and it took just three clicks for her to become a paid subscriber using her credit card on file. Then, during the subscription flow, she received an offer to take 20 percent off the monthly price of several subscriptions for one year. All she had to do was click the button next to the ones she wanted. to pay for. The list included publications she already subscribed to for free that had opted in to the offer. For Ms. Hermann-Johnson, finally upgrading them to a paid subscription was a relief. 'But I am also like, 'Oh, my gosh, I'm starting to pay a lot for these newsletters,'' she said.
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Big-name anchors going independent, making money in the Substack era
Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, is suddenly speaking out. "We are living through the most significant media disruption since the printing press, and it explains everything from why you can't stand your neighbor to our current political tumult." Today, he says on his site, "we live in a more chaotic environment, where the narrative frenzy of social media has given rise to political movements that gain power through exploiting attention of any kind, positive or negative, from moral panics to fulminating podium-thumpers. We've gone from 'Ask not what your country can do for you' to dunk tweets and death-by-emoji." How Donald Trump Dominates The News, Both Positively And Negatively Obviously, it's in McKenzie's interest to portray a media revolution with him as the chief rebel. When Substack launched in 2017, it was viewed as an intriguing experiment, an outlet largely for those who didn't have one. But in the Trump era, with his constant cable appearances and Truth Social posts, there's little question that we're submerged in a toxic environment. The president gets this, which is why he's done a number of podcast interviews. Read On The Fox News App He went on Joe Rogan and Kamala, uh, did not. Now, with big-name journalists giving up prime television gigs in favor of the site's independence, we are living in the Substack Era. What was once viewed as the Holy Grail – an anchoring or hosting job on a major network – is now dismissed as old-school legacy media with too many corporate constraints. Take my former Fox colleague Chris Wallace. He left for CNN (actually CNN-plus, which was euthanized in three weeks) and then launched a Saturday talk show. But Chris recently announced he's leaving the network to go independent, which undoubtedly includes Substack. Another ex-Fox colleague, Megyn Kelly, had a similar experience. Having been dropped by NBC after a bad experience there, she started a daily show and video podcast on Sirius XM, and now has 3.2 million subscribers on YouTube. Michelle Obama's 'Imo' Podcast Ranks 34Th On Spotify Podcasts Chart Chuck Todd, having been eased out of his "Meet the Press" job, was given an online streaming show. But not long ago he announced he was leaving NBC to go independent. When Dan Abrams gave up his NewsNation show after three years, he said: "As much as I love this show and the mission of this network, I just can't continue to give this show the attention it needs and deserves with all of my other professional commitments." The Mediaite founder later announced that he is concentrating on creating a YouTube channel for the site, working with other media folks. McKenzie's great insight is that he could connect writers and podcasters directly to their audience, with Substack taking a cut. They can opt for a revenue-sharing agreement. Now you might ask, what if you're not a famous former anchor or commentator? Turns out that niche sites do really well. They can work at other jobs at the same time. Many users report a six-figure income. This is especially striking in that most Substack people let you read their sites for free, or a shortened version, with the full column and special features available only for paying subscribers. The hope is that some of the freeloaders will become subscribers over time. Not everyone winds up at Substack voluntarily. Chris Cillizza, the former Washington Post columnist, is quite candid in saying he came to Substack after being laid off at CNN. He found himself with little to do after dropping the kids at school. Trump, Eyeing 3Rd Term, Keeps Attacking Elite Institutions – And Many Are Caving "I started this Substack — selfishly — to help me grapple with my changed life. To give me a platform where I could express myself — hopefully to an audience — about the world of politics, yes, but also how I was navigating a new reality." He has slowly built a following and chats with Todd once a week, which is something that Substackers do. Casandra Campbell of Really Good Business Ideas analyzed the 29 most popular Substacks. The first two are Letters from an American (hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers for political history) and Broken Palate. Michael Moore was No. 3, and the only other names I recognized were former candidate Allen West, the Bulwark, and ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich. The others had names like Dr. Mercola's Censored Library, DeLa Soul, The Pragmatic Engineer and The Cryptonite Weekly Rap. "Our political culture now mirrors chaos media culture," McKenzie says. "Opponents are not just to be argued against, but humiliated." Good luck changing that. Subscribe To Howie's Media Buzzmeter Podcast, A Riff On The Day's Hottest Stories Look, I subscribe to several Substack accounts. I'd like to subscribe to more but, with fees ranging from $5 to $40 a month, it gets expensive. So I read others for free and ponder whether to upgrade. I don't agree that this is the biggest deal since the Gutenberg press, around 1440, but it's having an impact on the media and political culture. Substack is hot, and there are competitors, mainly because journalists and politicos crave a connection that goes beyond the craziness of the Trump article source: Big-name anchors going independent, making money in the Substack era
Fox News
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Big-name anchors going independent, making money in the Substack era
Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, is suddenly speaking out. "We are living through the most significant media disruption since the printing press, and it explains everything from why you can't stand your neighbor to our current political tumult." Today, he says on his site, "we live in a more chaotic environment, where the narrative frenzy of social media has given rise to political movements that gain power through exploiting attention of any kind, positive or negative, from moral panics to fulminating podium-thumpers. We've gone from 'Ask not what your country can do for you' to dunk tweets and death-by-emoji." Obviously, it's in McKenzie's interest to portray a media revolution with him as the chief rebel. When Substack launched in 2017, it was viewed as an intriguing experiment, an outlet largely for those who didn't have one. But in the Trump era, with his constant cable appearances and Truth Social posts, there's little question that we're submerged in a toxic environment. The president gets this, which is why he's done a number of podcast interviews. He went on Joe Rogan and Kamala, uh, did not. Now, with big-name journalists giving up prime television gigs in favor of the site's independence, we are living in the Substack Era. What was once viewed as the Holy Grail – an anchoring or hosting job on a major network – is now dismissed as old-school legacy media with too many corporate constraints. Take my former Fox colleague Chris Wallace. He left for CNN (actually CNN-plus, which was euthanized in three weeks) and then launched a Saturday talk show. But Chris recently announced he's leaving the network to go independent, which undoubtedly includes Substack. Another ex-Fox colleague, Megyn Kelly, had a similar experience. Having been dropped by NBC after a bad experience there, she started a daily show and video podcast on Sirius XM, and now has 3.2 million subscribers on YouTube. Chuck Todd, having been eased out of his "Meet the Press" job, was given an online streaming show. But not long ago he announced he was leaving NBC to go independent. When Dan Abrams gave up his NewsNation show after three years, he said: "As much as I love this show and the mission of this network, I just can't continue to give this show the attention it needs and deserves with all of my other professional commitments." The Mediaite founder later announced that he is concentrating on creating a YouTube channel for the site, working with other media folks. McKenzie's great insight is that he could connect writers and podcasters directly to their audience, with Substack taking a cut. They can opt for a revenue-sharing agreement. Now you might ask, what if you're not a famous former anchor or commentator? Turns out that niche sites do really well. They can work at other jobs at the same time. Many users report a six-figure income. This is especially striking in that most Substack people let you read their sites for free, or a shortened version, with the full column and special features available only for paying subscribers. The hope is that some of the freeloaders will become subscribers over time. Not everyone winds up at Substack voluntarily. Chris Cillizza, the former Washington Post columnist, is quite candid in saying he came to Substack after being laid off at CNN. He found himself with little to do after dropping the kids at school. "I started this Substack — selfishly — to help me grapple with my changed life. To give me a platform where I could express myself — hopefully to an audience — about the world of politics, yes, but also how I was navigating a new reality." He has slowly built a following and chats with Todd once a week, which is something that Substackers do. Casandra Campbell of Really Good Business Ideas analyzed the 29 most popular Substacks. The first two are Letters from an American (hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers for political history) and Broken Palate. Michael Moore was No. 3, and the only other names I recognized were former candidate Allen West, the Bulwark, and ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich. The others had names like Dr. Mercola's Censored Library, DeLa Soul, The Pragmatic Engineer and The Cryptonite Weekly Rap. "Our political culture now mirrors chaos media culture," McKenzie says. "Opponents are not just to be argued against, but humiliated." Good luck changing that. Look, I subscribe to several Substack accounts. I'd like to subscribe to more but, with fees ranging from $5 to $40 a month, it gets expensive. So I read others for free and ponder whether to upgrade. I don't agree that this is the biggest deal since the Gutenberg press, around 1440, but it's having an impact on the media and political culture. Substack is hot, and there are competitors, mainly because journalists and politicos crave a connection that goes beyond the craziness of the Trump age.
