Many readers love bullish, controversial superstars-and will pay serious money to follow their work-but legacy publications struggle to contain such figures. This reveals a fundamental problem for modern journalism. Yes, Substack is selling soap operas to people who think they’re above soap operas. By supporting their newsletters, readers get endless feuds, dramatic exits, high-profile guest stars, ambitious crossover events, and compelling villains.

Many of the authors now showing up on Substack are known for fighting with journalists at other outlets, and one another. (Together, the Laverys have received $555,000 in advances from the platform.) Yglesias was an old-school blogger, then co-founded Vox, and has now returned to his independent roots.Ĭonor Friedersdorf: Why Matthew Yglesias left Voxīut for a certain subset of the American elite-a group of people who are concentrated in journalism, academia, and related fields who are likely to be active on Twitter and who have strong opinions on the 1619 Project and the ACLU’s Chase Strangio-following the lives of these people is what they do instead of watching General Hospital or The Bachelor. Lavery is an English professor, an expert on Japanese Victoriana, and one-third of a Brooklyn throuple that also includes Daniel Lavery, who has a Substack named after William Shatner. Why should they? Doyle has 43,000 Twitter followers, a fan base 20 times smaller than that of the Sarcastic Mars Rover parody account. Perhaps those names don’t mean anything to you. Jude Doyle is leaving ! Grace Lavery has joined ! Oh man, Matt Yglesias shouldn’t have taken that advance he’d have made far more money purely from subscriptions! Over the past few months, the PR travails of the newsletter start-up have become a reliable source of media gossip. People who are Extremely Online have Substack. Normal people-with regular lives and real jobs-have soap operas and reality shows.

Soap opera central scoops