What I've learned on Substack

Weird niches are good

I launched Slow Boring shortly after Election Day 2020.

Donald Trump had, it seemed, been defeated and significant elements in conservative politics were trying to push him off the stage. It also felt, to me and I think others, that the thermostatic opposition to Trump and the circumstances of 2020 had pushed major civic institutions — including, notably, many mainstream media outlets — too far toward the fringe left. And many of us who launched Substacks at around that time included these broad media criticisms in the pitches we made for ourselves.

So I was interested to read New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn’s recent interview with Ben Smith, in which Kahn seems, in 2024, to agree with a lot of those criticisms.

Unfortunately, his specific takeaway seems to be that the Times should trivialize the threat a not-defeated-after-all Trump poses to American institutions while continuing to grind an ax about Joe Biden not doing a sit-down interview with the paper. This has created a sort of paradoxical situation in which the NYT remains stridently neutral in its core political coverage, but quite left-wing in other areas. Pieces like “What Is ‘Queer Food’? A Conference Explores (and Tastes) Some Answers” or Ethicist columns where the dilemma is that your kid likes toy guns are very clearly by, and for, progressives.

The result is an asymmetrical impact on the political system: The paper’s tough coverage of Biden hurts him badly with both readers who are more moderate than Biden and also readers who are to the left of Biden, while right-of-center readers dismiss coverage of their side as hopelessly biased. So even though I appreciated Kahn’s mantra that “the newsroom is not a safe space,” I think we’re still left with a mainstream media that is both too detached from the actual stakes of American politics and also too out of touch with the cultural mores of the typical American.

I won’t say that I was glad to find myself annoyed by Kahn’s interview. But it was a reminder that even though a lot has changed since we launched, there is still an important role for niche publications in general and, I believe, for this niche publication in particular.

We launched at a moment that felt fraught in some very specific ways, and both Kahn’s interview and my friend Emily’s coverage of our aspirations in launching Vox have me reflecting on how things have changed over the last almost-four years, and what we’ve learned from it all.

The big lesson: It works

Thinking about what I’ve learned writing this newsletter, my biggest overall take away is that it has genuinely succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

Quitting my job felt like a huge risk with a lot of psychological upside, and I genuinely didn’t imagine this newsletter becoming a source of revenue on this scale. I’m not an empire-builder on the level of Bari Weiss, but I’m still pleasantly surprised that we’ve been able to grow our business to the extent we have. And I’m very grateful to everyone who subscribes, of course, but I’m especially grateful to people who’ve been here from the early days — without your early support, this would not have worked out.

My other big concern, beyond “will anyone subscribe?” was “will I lose all my access if I’m not with a big publications?”

The short answer is no. Slow Boring’s readership is modest compared to an outlet like Vox, but I think it is correctly perceived as influential, and that’s what matters to the sources who matter most to me. I also have a lot of followers on Twitter, and people care what I say there. I do think I probably lose out on some invites due to not having an official staff job — a trivial example is that when Obama was president, I got invited to White House Christmas parties, and that hasn’t been the case under Biden — but people still answer my emails and texts, which is what matters.

Back when I started this thing, there was a wave of hype around Substack, with pieces asking questions like “is this the future of journalism?”

I have no idea what the future of journalism is, but I do think we can now say that part of the future of journalism is the existence of a bunch of small-scale subscription publications like this one. That it is both possible to secure an audience and to do the basic work with these tools, and people in the larger ecosystem are increasingly aware of newsletters and respect them.

Meanwhile, what I’ve learned about myself is that while I was never narrowly specialized, I have really enjoyed returning to full generalist mode.

Slouching toward climate heterodoxy

If I think about the interpersonal and professional disputes that led me toward leaving Vox in 2020, issues related to race and crime loomed very large. And while I continue to write about those issues, I’ve never wanted to be a culture war crank who just feeds his audience an endless series of anti-woke takes, so that’s mostly not what I write about.

Something I learned about myself, though, is that my views on climate and energy policy were perhaps further from the progressive conventional wisdom than I realized. At Vox, we were organized into sub-teams and I was on the “politics and policy” team, which was separate from the “climate and science” team. There wasn’t a hard and fast dividing line between “climate” and “policy,” but there was a kind of loose understanding about what fell on which beat. This meant that I didn’t spend much, if any, time during the late-Obama and Trump years covering the intra-coalition fight over supply-side fossil fuel policy.

But the Obama administration had a pretty clear policy of trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through pricing, through innovation, and through regulation of the use of fossil fuels — typically regulation that was primarily focused on “co-benefits” from reduced soot and smog. There was always a group of environmentalists who pushed back against that approach and argued instead that we should be trying to curtail fossil fuel production. They organized a major campaign to get Obama to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, and he eventually did what they wanted, but this was still a relatively minor piece of the policy puzzle.

During the Trump years, this idea of supply-side restriction became much more mainstream:

• Then-candidate Joe Biden promised to end all oil and gas leasing on federal land.

• Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Deputy Treasury Secretary and wife of a prominent congressman, wrote a spring 2020 op-ed calling on the Fed to lock fossil fuel companies out of emergency pandemic assistance.

Neither of these things happened — the former because it was blocked in court, the latter because Jay Powell wouldn’t do it. And even though Biden ended up nominating Raskin for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, her confirmation was blocked. Oil and gas production are at record levels under Biden, and in practice, policy has been pretty continuous with the Obama-era approach. But these were mainstream Democratic Party policy demands, and had they been implemented, I think the Biden economy would be a huge mess. Even something relatively small like Chuck Schumer blocking SPR refilling in the CARES Act has been a real own goal for Democrats.

I wasn’t thinking much about this stuff when I was getting ready to launch Slow Boring, but out on my own, I’ve had the opportunity to weave between foreign policy, economic policy, and climate policy in a way that few journalists do. And I’ve come to see the mainstreaming of this fairly extreme approach to climate change as probably the central error of the contemporary progressive movement. This is a kind of heterodox stand even relative to heterodoxy, but I do think it emerges pretty quickly once you break down silos a bit.

It’s good to be weird

A related lesson that we at Slow Boring keep re-learning is that in the context of this newsletter, it pays to be weird.

We get a lot of traction out of stories on out-of-the-news topics like prison management, counterfactual history, Medicare Part D, or Jamaican metallurgists’ role in the Industrial Revolution. This reminds me to an extent of conversations we used to have with the suits about “The Weeds.” They would suggest that more people might listen to the show if instead of boring topics, we covered interesting ones. And maybe instead of interviews with obscure academics, we should interview charismatic famous people. And, yes, a show featuring interviews with charismatic famous people talking about the buzziest topics in the news is, in fact, a better idea for a podcast. But it’s such a good idea for a podcast that lots of people are already trying to execute on it. A lot of the time, what you need to have a successful media product is competent execution of something distinctive. A large share of a small pie can be better than a tiny slice of a really big pie.

It’s just so easy to get dragged into the discourse — this week everyone is fighting about how university administrators are handling anti-Israel protests on campus and so I need to develop a take on how university administrators are handling anti-Israel protests on campus. But I don’t actually have any unique information to bring to bear on this topic. There isn’t some element of the factual situation that is missing.

What we have noticed about this discourse is that there are a lot of assertions flying around about protest movements in 1968 and their impact on that election, and we are trying to take a serious and open-minded look at the empirical research on that. The result — coming soon — will be interesting to a relatively narrow slice of the public, but I’m hopeful that we can actually say something useful and insightful and original to those who do care.

Now that Slow Boring is a somewhat mature business, probably the hardest and most important part of the job is the collective work of brainstorming topics with Kate and Ben. Left to my own devices, I tend to fall prey to the gravitational pull of my personal obsessions — it’s really important to beat Trump, you win elections by being moderate, housing is the most important substantive issue, you need to focus on productivity in a full employment economy, etc. Those things are important to me and I think they are all true and I will obviously keep talking about them. But me repeating myself is not providing much value to anyone.

As a reader, I keep wishing that other writers I like who work for bigger institutional outlets had assignment editors who would force them out of their lanes a bit more.

Many of the most interesting New York Times columns are those in which the writer gets out of their normal range of coverage, like Jamelle Bouie on John Frankenheimer or Michelle Goldberg on Adelle Waldmann’s novel. It’s hard to force people to write about things they don’t want to write about, but I’d love to read more pieces like this. What happened to Paul Krugman’s 2007-vintage views on immigration? What does he think about Gaza? He probably thinks it’s a complicated, contentious issue that he has no expertise in — fair enough. But he’s very smart, and I’m genuinely curious what he’d come up with if someone made him write about it.

Slow Boring’s first presidential election

I’ve been in digital media across presidential election cycles in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. And I’ve also been publishing Slow Boring for years now. But 2024 is Slow Boring’s first presidential election cycle, and it’s in many ways challenging. Should I talk about polling? How should I cover the conventions? The debates, if they happen?

Initially, I had the idea of trying to take a serious look at the policy positions of the GOP primary candidates. I thought that would be interesting as an intellectual exercise, even if policy wasn’t at the core of the arguments. But the whole primary wound up barely happening, and the candidates didn’t really release policy programs.

Biden and Trump, meanwhile, are having a policy debate that I find frustrating because Trump is proposing the following:

1. A larger budget deficit.

2. More trade restrictions

3. A smaller labor force.

4. Curbs on Federal Reserve independence.

On its face, that is a highly inflationary agenda, unless you ditch (4) in which case it’s a recipe for higher interest rates. But that’s not the argument we’re having, in part because the media coverage of the issue has been irresponsible and in part because the White House knows that both inflation and immigration are bad topics for Biden, so they don’t want to talk about them either. It also just hasn’t been my experience that there are a lot of clicks to be harvested in writing about macroeconomic policy, even though people say they are very worried about inflation.

Which is just to say that the last thing I’ve learned (so far) is that in life, one is always discovering brand new arenas of ignorance.