Publications need something between "No Access" and "Pay $10/month and hope you don't forget to cancel". Papers used to sell single issues you could peruse all day. The pursuit of subscriptions above all else is a detriment to me reading things like the Financial Times or The New Yorker
Yes, I know there are some workarounds, but I feel bad stealing from them just because I don't like their revenue model / pricing.
No one has ever been able to make the economics work with individual digital purchases. Most people simply find even $1 to be too large of a barrier when there's so much free content online. And the revenue stream is highly volatile relative to subscriptions and ads. Much better to entice potential subscribers with occasional free articles and other online engagement in order to get the reliable recurring revenue of subscriptions.
For example, if Slow Boring started offering individual purchases, then I imagine fewer free subscribers would convert to paid over time because when they finally got over their barrier to paying, they can contend themselves with a single article rather than committing to a subscription. Matt and co. would have to regularly convince free subscribers and guest to making purchases, whereas now they just need to get us to click subscribe once.
Furthermore, once we commit to a purchase, we're more likely to read future paid articles that we've already bought. We may even feel compelled to consume to justify our past purchase decision. As we grow accustom to the habit of reading SB, our subscription becomes increasingly sticky.
On the other hand, if you pay for an $8 Sunday afternoon beer bust, you might stick around all afternoon and “get your money’s worth” for the “subscription” you purchased, rather than head to another bar.
My strong default is that if it doesn't exist it's because it's already been tested and it's a bad idea. Here I'm just stubbornly gonna refuse. It makes no sense that newspapers and magazines can't replicate the prior physical economic models work digitally. I suspect there's too much payment friction but you should be able to now get around that with Apple Pay push two times to read. I don't get the volatility either. They had the same volatility in physical distribution prior.
The biggest difference is people have become looser with their money and subscribe to things and forget to cancel them. Whether to have cable used to be a big decision. Now grads students go on airplane vacations.
The barrier to entry for a physical subscription was a lot higher - you had to deal with these things physically piling up at your door, rather than just flowing into your inbox.
Do you not remember how hard physical newspapers used to push subscriptions? Sure you *could* buy individual issues every day, but they wanted guaranteed daily sales, whether from an individual customer or from a news stand that would order the same number of copies every day to resell.
I could see having Substack operate a "pay $10/month minimum into an account you have with us and you can buy any paid Substack article for $1" scheme. Also, it's not refundable: your Substack Balance can't be turned back into cash (and you can't buy articles on your own Substack). And you can't keep using the Balance after your subscription ends, so you can't build up a balance and then slowly spend it down: you have to put in $10/month to be able to buy articles at all.
That would avoid the worst of the problem with micropayments where you have to break past the barrier to paying over and over again, and also creates somewhat of a "use it or lose it" mentality to the Balance, meaning people get the ability to buy a single article that their regular Substack linked to without having to take on yet another subscription, while writers get a useful boost from one-off visitors who are unlikely to subscribe.
Perhaps only let people use Substack Balance if they are paying for at least 2 Substack subs, or something.
[Also, you'd have to let individual substacks set different per-article rates, make it 1/5 of the lowest subscription rate, for instance, so it's $2/article if it's $10/month]
What substack and similar platforms need more than individual purchases is magazine-like bundles. Since it's digital information that costs nothing to copy, there seems to be value left on the table here. If a user would fork out $40 a month for four separate subscriptions (a lot for only being able to read the work of four people!), everyone wins if the user can get 20 related subscriptions for $5 more. Remember we get access to *all of the content on Netflix for $10 a month*!
The only reason I subscribe to slow boring is Matt is insanely prolific. Other writers, even ones I like a lot, are giving you something 1-2 times a week for $10 a month. On a per article basis that's awful value compared to a traditional magazine.
Substack kinda does do this, because monthly subscription fees are quite low and its trivially easy to cancel.
Am I the only one who will sometimes buy one month of access to a substack and then cancel immediately? Then you get 30 days of access, you can read the archives, and its like $5-10.
Why not charge $2 an article? Most SB subscribers would rather pay $8 a month than $10 to get 5 articles. The people who are willing to pay $2 for an article are also probably a pretty attractive pool of potential customers?
I agree that this seems plausible. A $75 New Yorker subscription costs about $250 if you buy it weekly at the airport.
But the math is even more generous than you suggested, isn't it? At $2 an article, don't SB readers get about $40+ worth of material a month?
Edit: but the single article cost has to be relatively high to make it economically feasible. Wildly variable income streams are less attractive than steady, predictable ones, even with an income premium.
which is why $2 versus 40 cents an article seems reasonable. people who want an article for a buck just want cheap shit. see what a dollar gets you at starbucks!
Because psychologically, using a pre-paid voucher and paying out of pocket, even for the same product at the same price isn't the same. It probably is a sunk-cost fallacy or similar illogical factor, but the willingness to consume something where I've already is much higher - it removes the mental friction of calculating, "is this really worth it." Because for any given article the answer is probably, "no it is not worth $1 for me to spend 5 minutes reading this article." But the same aggregated calculation of pay $10 for 10 articles, or whatever, probably does pan out because I'm able to value the investment in my personal enrichment. I'm not paying for 5 minutes, but rather I'm paying for insight and relevancy. Or support independent journalism or whatever.
I think the problem is that they’d be afraid that letting people pay without signing up for a subscription would drastically cut into the money they make from people who subscribe with the intention of canceling it but then forget and end up accidentally paying for a subscription for months.
That's Matt's point though. All this competition is good for consumers from the narrow standpoint of making content cheaper. It is terrible for the industry of journalism though.
That's a good point. Occasionally, usually in sports, there will be an article I want to read. I'd happily pay $1 to read the single article. Why not? But they insist I sign up for a subscription (typically with a super cheap entry fee, which I pay). Then I forget I subscribed and three months later angrily cancel.
Then the next time I want to read an article I don't subscribe because I know I will forget.
Just let me pay the $1 (or $0.50) and I would be happy
I feel the same. I'm in Phoenix and at times I want to read articles from big daily local papers in my region (SoCal, Nevada, Mtn West States) and it makes no sense to plop down $10-$20/mo for a subscription, but I'd gladly pay $0.50-$1 to access an article, but that option is precluded so I go elsewhere. It's like journalism needs an NBA League Pass that protects the local market, but lets you access out of town content at a reasonable price.
I wonder if a larger portion of sales being buy-once would dissuade publications from writing clickbait (grabbait?) headlines that are obviously BS once you read the article. Or if it would encourage it, for that matter.
I work at a small business that is funded based on annual memberships and offer a mix of free public content and paywalled, more expert content. We offer alternatives to the annual membership but none are very popular.
I think the idea of an alternative to a subscription is more attractive than the reality.
I thought the company Scroll was a great idea. Like Spotify for the open web - pay every site you visit a fraction of your monthly subscription. Unfortunately they went belly up after a year.
They do. The model for several newspapers and magazines is that the first few articles per month are free, and then there's a paywall after that. If you find yourself repeatedly hitting the paywall, that's a motivation to subscribe.
The past few places I've lived have had free independent weeklies that specialize in the local music and arts, but also bundle some mix of more general interest local news and editorial.
I think one way they do it is with a very small, low-paid staff. This blog is a good example of the scale. Imagine MY hiring a DC music beat writer, and ad-sales guy and bundling up all his weekly content with a more local bent and I think you get a similar output.
I think a big part of the problem is that local news is really boring. You read it if you don’t have any options but it is hard to compete for attention with hot button national issues let alone with social media and other entertainment. It used to be cheaper to produce and so you got it as filler which and it turns out to be good when people are forced to eat their “broccoli”.
Indeed there are parallels with this information diet and our super surplus of highly tasty and satiety real foods today. We have produced “better” products than is good for us. See also, bowling alone issues.
I think this is one of those things that’s true right up till it’s not. I mean like I wouldn’t think school board politics would be very interesting and yet we have moms 4 Liberty. We have people who think a Ruby Bridges biography is way too racially progressive for their school as a semi national movement.
All the National news with its brimming culture war have their local instances but like it’s up to some entrepreneurial person to get it noticed and make a fuss about it.
Except it makes sense. People's ability to invest in their interests have become much more targeted and specific. So you have people get really into wine, LARPing, video games, board games, British royalty, Korean pop, Bollywood, etc. There are now the resources to go really deep into people's preferred interest which also enables them to avoid other things that are less interesting to them.
So for people who are REALLY into school boards, they can get into it. But for everyone else who finds it boring, they can focus on their own niche. Specialization is like fire, powerful and dangerous.
This seems to be pretty good news for something like a substack or other small overhead business model and pretty bad news for keeping a huge overhead for a generalist publication. I would be more interested in having local government substacks for ~100 dollars a year or whatever than try to revive the business model of the Tribune company.
I agree, with the exception that getting 10k subscribers out of 300 million is much easier than getting 10k subscribers out of a much smaller population. In theory its more relevant to locals, but advertising a substack is much harder than advertising a newspaper - if for no other reason than most people know what a newspaper is and I'm not sure most people know what a "substack" is.
I've help with charity fundraising before ... it is almost always much easier to find a few people willing to write a $10k check, than 100 people writing $100 checks. And it isn't just linear function of dealing with more people. The interactions often require just as much convincing and cajoling for the lower amounts ... often even more effort!
If criticizing people speaking giving prepared remarks, from your stage at your event qualifies as nutpicking well I think we have a profound disagreement about what’s entailed by that term.
It wasn’t something some rando said even extermeperaneously at a pattern it was part of the official program and they’ve had many years to distance themselves from it and say no no we mean books like Gender Queer not books with such extremely divisive lines such as, and I quote “Black people and white people can be friends.” I happened to teach this curriculum and it’s hot garbage but it’s not racialist at all it’s very much in line with the traditional understanding of racism as about personal animus.
Like they put this person on their own stage, and stand by their remarks so I’m skeptical of the view that as a movement it is limited to more extreme content. It’s not somebody’s TikTok or X post gone viral.
A representative of Moms 4 Liberty has explicitly stated that she opposes the statement or concept that "Black people and white people can be friends"?
And this one https://youtu.be/MRfy2xs8Xpg?feature=sharedp which are both very much not any kind of modernist interpretation of racism. It is very literally a direct quotation of one of the two books and is representative of how the book dealt racism. In a speech at a convention I saw on You tube the mother was concerned that it asked children how they would feel if they were Ruby.
I don't often watch the local news, but when I do, I'm shocked by how little is there.
"The median length of a story with video on local television, according to PEJ’s detailed studies of the medium, is 41 seconds, and some critics have complained this is too short. The median length of a network TV news package was 2 minutes and 23 seconds."
And it's mostly inane "live reporting" from in front of the police station, breathlessly telling the audience that the cops are looking for the perp of a string of burglaries or something. Local TV news is right at the bottom of the barrel of journalism. But people do still watch it and don't think it is boring.
Also there is a (small) subsidy to local print journalism. These local stations all have websites with local articles and horrible syndication and click-bait content. But they do have these longer-form articles. I wonder if there is a way to leverage that more.
"If it bleads it leads". You're basically describing why local news has a "conservative" bias and why Americans estimates of crime is usually wildly higher than in reality (if I'm not mistaken even within their own cities, Americans will say their neighborhoods are safe but other neighborhoods are where are the "bad stuff" happens).
Reminder, if we are talking about gun control America is a horribly violent country, the shame of the developed world. But if we're talking about normal Americans being worried about the murder in their neighborhood, they're just whining Karens who don't understand how safe they really are. Now back to discussing why news is failing in America!
It’s both true that American violent crime rates are higher than those in many comparable countries, but not constantly rising the way that many people always seem to think they are.
I don't know who Daniel Penny is, but I think you're describing the situation the past few years. But people have thought crime rates were increasing for my entire life, even though they were decreasing for the majority of my life. That's not about Democrats or Republicans - that's about people having inaccurate perceptions of crime.
How do we balance the fact that Americans estimate of crime is usually wildly higher than in reality, and also that violent crime in America is also an extreme outlier relative to the rest of the developed world?
By acknowledging that most of the crime is concentrated in areas the median American doesn't go, and committed by people the median American doesn't interact with. That's how people can be "objectively" right that our homicide rates are terrible, and that most Americans are "actually" quite safe and unlikely to be he victim of a crime, so they shouldn't be so worried and convinced that their neighborhoods are under siege.
If you remove the "outliers," then America looks about as safe and peaceful as you would expect from other parts of the developed world. But, it should be a national tragedy that "large" swaths of the country are "outliers" like this. I think it's also tragic that the laws and policies of the past 75 years encouraged exactly this sort of segregation into the "Haves" and Have-nots" based on the neighborhoods people can afford to live or move to.
"If you remove the "outliers," then America looks about as safe and peaceful as you would expect from other parts of the developed world."
I don't think this is accurate. If you remove American "outliers" then you would need to remove outliers from other comparable countries, and once again you see a significant separation occur.
Rural areas in the US are more dangerous than rural areas in other developed countries, uban cities are more dangerous than urban cities in other developed countries, etc.
All that being said, I agree with your underlying point about the outlier areas in the US being a national tragedy.
The US has a much wider variance in the distribution of violence though. So if you remove the worst urban areas from both the US and peer comparisons the US only comes across as 2x worse, rather than 5-10x. It shows how severe the "violence gini coefficient" really is within the US.
Random thought: I wonder to what extent the widespread adoption of term limits in state and local governments has contributed to making local political news less interesting to most people? I.e., if you live in a town where Mayor Jones can keep getting re-elected for the next 40 years, are you more motivated to pay attention to news coverage of local politics than if Mayor Jones is going to automatically be barred from running for mayor after no more than 8 years?
I think this is absolutely true. Term limits are the reason that I know that Willie Brown is the reason the California legislature has term limits, but I can't name the current speaker of the California assembly. I can also name many of my local politicians but not what positions they currently hold, because they swap to another whenever they get termed out of one.
I think local politics feel boring if you're not actually paying attention. Here in Chicago the local politics are an endless source of... entertainment? despair? I'm not sure, but they're certainly not boring if you actually bother following along. Most people I know just have no interest because knowing a lot about local politics doesn't make them sound erudite the way listing off senators does.
I think Axios Local has a good take on this. Instead of broccoli you get a daily multivitamin. They publish 5 mini stories each day instead of a full paper. Which is honestly about how much noteworthy stuff happens in a city. “Mayor says we should fix potholes” only needs a paragraph or two.
One way you could increase coverage of local news is bundling. Have a large reputable written news organization hire local correspondents in the big cities across America and then sell access to WaPo or NYT local that gives you the ability to read their local coverage from any city.
This is a much more compelling value proposition than subscribing to a local paper. Most of us now have connections to multiple locations -- we went to college in one city, grew up in another and have family in a third. Without this kind of bundling I have to pay, say, $5/month to have access to local news in just one of those cities. With bundling I can pay the same amount and get access to local news across the country (and often there will be art, pop culture or some weird event stories of interest in cities I don't even have a connection with.
Right now local news is basically like a cable company trying to sell access to channels a la carte. Each channel has to charge alot to fund it's content from the few subscriptions it gets and you end up with few profitable channels. You bundle the channels and the value proposition is compelling for lots of viewers and everyone wins.
(I know it's counterintuitive that consumers are made better off by removing their choices ...I didn't believe it myself until I tried working through some example math).
Substack is perfect for local content. Why pay for copy editors, printers, and ad sellers when all that has become useless crap? Ten thousand subscribers can support a substsck with 3 or 4 journeyman level writers. Most cities have 10,000 people who will pay $8/month for local news.
Great for opinion not so great for news. No one author can cover everything and subscribing to enough authors to get anything like relatively complete local news coverage/analysis is financially unworkable.
Substack (unless they add bundling) works on a value proposition where a small number of people who get really high value out of most things an author creates support the author. News (even local news) works on a model where very large numbers of people get a little value from having access to the content produced by many journalists.
Worse, because of that the cost of personally vetting the reliability gets out of hand. I read the NYT and trust them to make sure reporters do basic fact checking. I couldn't remember all those reporter's names to tell them apart from crackpots if I wanted to.
A former journalist who lives in my town has in fact started a substack trying to be hyper-local! We'll see how it works out for him. I don't think it is a full-time job (or paycheck), but a decent side hustle given he likes to keep up with town news anyhow.
Also see what it did to Hersh. He was a good journalist when he had editors that held his feet to the fire. Moving to substack turned him into a crackpot willing to repeat lies (likely from Russian agents). His skill is sensing something fishy (and there was just not what he said it was) cultivating sources by forming relationships not doubting them.
I think a fair number of people would say Hersh was a crackpot long before moving to Substack. Wasn't he pushing 9/11 conspiracy theories at one point?
This was the big one I was thinking of. I actually remember where I was when I read it and I was extremely confused about what was going on with him and double checked if he was who I thought he was.
Yes, I should have been more specific. It turned his supposed journalistic output crackpotty. He's personally been kinda crackpotty for awhile but that's exactly why having editors matters so much -- the talent for developing a source and judging what's likely true don't always go together (probably often the opposite).
Yeah I was going to come here and say that maybe Substack could help. Recruit a strong, trustworthy local journalist to start it up, and interested people can fund it. Somebody to cover local government, somebody to cover local business, somebody to cover high school and local college sports, etc.
DC Crime Facts, which I learned about here, is a good example of this. I'm not sure what the pseudonymous writer's paying job is, but the newsletter is free (and excellent).
There are a few cities that now have a local substack, one of the first (and the one that's been franchising the model to other cities) is Manchester Mill: https://manchestermill.co.uk/
Building on that example, Thompson elaborates on how the internet has broken that model in legacy media while recreating it in streaming services like Spotify in his article, "The Great Unbundling", https://stratechery.com/2017/the-great-unbundling/
I think it's hard to apply that bundling model to local news though.
In the example of bundling sports and history with ESPN and the History channel, the sports fan values sports more than history, but they value history SOME.
If I bought local news that comes bundled with other local news I don't care about, that isn't adding value. As a sports fan I might want to watch some documentaries occasionally, but as a Cleveland resident I'd never be like "oh sweet, the state fair is coming to Sacramento!"
Yep. The historical bundle was the local newspaper that included national news, sports, classified, etc. in addition to the local news. Following the "Great Unbundling" of the last two decades, consumers have better and cheaper options for each part of the newspaper bundle, which leaves local news lacking in a business model.
That was my reaction when I first heard this idea but it turns out to be false. When you work it out the reason it works is because people often get a small but non-zero value from access to many sources but unless you're an airline you usually have to pick one price everyone (both ppl who just get a bit of value and those who get alot) pays.
For instance, with cable channels maybe I love the discovery channel and I'd pay $10/month for it but there are 99 other channels that occasionally have something I like on so I'd pay maybe 9c/month to have access to each of them. Suppose there are 10,000 customers each of whom have their own (different) favorite $10 channel (distributed uniformly) and for whom the others are worth only 9c a month.
Now let's say the channels are offered a la carte. Each channel sets a price. If they pick $10 they get 100 subscribers (the ppl w/ that as their favorite) and get $1000/month. Lowering their prices doesn't pick up new subscribers until they hit the 9c price point because it's only worth 10c to everyone else. At the 9c price point they get 10k subscribers and earn $900/momth. So the a la carte price ends up being $10 a month for each channel and everyone gets one channel.
If instead the cable company offers a 100 channel bundle for $15/month then all of us sign up because we get $10 + 99*.09 worth of value ... about $19. If that fee is shared out equally then each channel gets $15,000 /month.
So literally every single individual and supplier in that market was made better. So it's not subsidizing in the usual sense. Sure it's not likely that every local affiliate is literally exactly equally situated as in my example but not hard for no one to be worse off than w/o bundling.
But the thing about local news is that it's local. I get my local news with my cable package, but if I got EVERYONE's local news that would not add value to my cable package.
I get your concept. I have live tv (technically youtube tv) mostly for sports, but hey if something piques my interest on HGTV I now get a benefit and HGTV gets extra eyeballs.
But there just aren't scenarios where I get a value add by checking out some local news that isn't where I live. On the rare occasion something becomes worthy of interest, it'll get picked up by national news.
Well you certainly aren't hurt by having access to other local news -- it doesn't take much effort to set your address to indicate your primary feed. Certainly it's not as important to me as local news where I live and I don't follow all the stories there.
And maybe it's not something you want but I frequently find myself reading local stories from other locations when they are
1) some crazy human interest story from some random city. Local dog saves cat from drowning.
2) Are 'local news' in that they cover some local artist or fashion trend or event where I find the subject interesting.
3) Cover some event that informs me about problems facing government/transit (Philly is building a new mass transit system and it's very cheap or expensive) or are just shocking: for instance Chicago's scandal selling rights to ticketing cars.
4) Cover local news where I went to college, used to live or where family and friends live.
5) Give local background to a story with national importance. For instance when Puerto Rico went bancrupt learning about what's going on with their economy or learning background about how Texas's energy market worked re: big freeze or what it's like to live in the really poor parts of Appalachia or the fracking bomb towns. The national news gives the basic story but not always the local background.
6) Relate to something someone mentions in a discussion on substack or Facebook.
Publications need something between "No Access" and "Pay $10/month and hope you don't forget to cancel". Papers used to sell single issues you could peruse all day. The pursuit of subscriptions above all else is a detriment to me reading things like the Financial Times or The New Yorker
Yes, I know there are some workarounds, but I feel bad stealing from them just because I don't like their revenue model / pricing.
No one has ever been able to make the economics work with individual digital purchases. Most people simply find even $1 to be too large of a barrier when there's so much free content online. And the revenue stream is highly volatile relative to subscriptions and ads. Much better to entice potential subscribers with occasional free articles and other online engagement in order to get the reliable recurring revenue of subscriptions.
For example, if Slow Boring started offering individual purchases, then I imagine fewer free subscribers would convert to paid over time because when they finally got over their barrier to paying, they can contend themselves with a single article rather than committing to a subscription. Matt and co. would have to regularly convince free subscribers and guest to making purchases, whereas now they just need to get us to click subscribe once.
Furthermore, once we commit to a purchase, we're more likely to read future paid articles that we've already bought. We may even feel compelled to consume to justify our past purchase decision. As we grow accustom to the habit of reading SB, our subscription becomes increasingly sticky.
I doubt many people feel compelled to do much by an $8 purchase. A single drink in a bar costs at least that much.
On the other hand, if you pay for an $8 Sunday afternoon beer bust, you might stick around all afternoon and “get your money’s worth” for the “subscription” you purchased, rather than head to another bar.
I doubt that there are $8 beer busts any more, but beer busts do continue to exist, at least at gay bars on Sunday afternoons.
My strong default is that if it doesn't exist it's because it's already been tested and it's a bad idea. Here I'm just stubbornly gonna refuse. It makes no sense that newspapers and magazines can't replicate the prior physical economic models work digitally. I suspect there's too much payment friction but you should be able to now get around that with Apple Pay push two times to read. I don't get the volatility either. They had the same volatility in physical distribution prior.
The biggest difference is people have become looser with their money and subscribe to things and forget to cancel them. Whether to have cable used to be a big decision. Now grads students go on airplane vacations.
The barrier to entry for a physical subscription was a lot higher - you had to deal with these things physically piling up at your door, rather than just flowing into your inbox.
Do you not remember how hard physical newspapers used to push subscriptions? Sure you *could* buy individual issues every day, but they wanted guaranteed daily sales, whether from an individual customer or from a news stand that would order the same number of copies every day to resell.
I could see having Substack operate a "pay $10/month minimum into an account you have with us and you can buy any paid Substack article for $1" scheme. Also, it's not refundable: your Substack Balance can't be turned back into cash (and you can't buy articles on your own Substack). And you can't keep using the Balance after your subscription ends, so you can't build up a balance and then slowly spend it down: you have to put in $10/month to be able to buy articles at all.
That would avoid the worst of the problem with micropayments where you have to break past the barrier to paying over and over again, and also creates somewhat of a "use it or lose it" mentality to the Balance, meaning people get the ability to buy a single article that their regular Substack linked to without having to take on yet another subscription, while writers get a useful boost from one-off visitors who are unlikely to subscribe.
Perhaps only let people use Substack Balance if they are paying for at least 2 Substack subs, or something.
[Also, you'd have to let individual substacks set different per-article rates, make it 1/5 of the lowest subscription rate, for instance, so it's $2/article if it's $10/month]
What substack and similar platforms need more than individual purchases is magazine-like bundles. Since it's digital information that costs nothing to copy, there seems to be value left on the table here. If a user would fork out $40 a month for four separate subscriptions (a lot for only being able to read the work of four people!), everyone wins if the user can get 20 related subscriptions for $5 more. Remember we get access to *all of the content on Netflix for $10 a month*!
The only reason I subscribe to slow boring is Matt is insanely prolific. Other writers, even ones I like a lot, are giving you something 1-2 times a week for $10 a month. On a per article basis that's awful value compared to a traditional magazine.
Substack kinda does do this, because monthly subscription fees are quite low and its trivially easy to cancel.
Am I the only one who will sometimes buy one month of access to a substack and then cancel immediately? Then you get 30 days of access, you can read the archives, and its like $5-10.
Why not charge $2 an article? Most SB subscribers would rather pay $8 a month than $10 to get 5 articles. The people who are willing to pay $2 for an article are also probably a pretty attractive pool of potential customers?
I agree that this seems plausible. A $75 New Yorker subscription costs about $250 if you buy it weekly at the airport.
But the math is even more generous than you suggested, isn't it? At $2 an article, don't SB readers get about $40+ worth of material a month?
Edit: but the single article cost has to be relatively high to make it economically feasible. Wildly variable income streams are less attractive than steady, predictable ones, even with an income premium.
which is why $2 versus 40 cents an article seems reasonable. people who want an article for a buck just want cheap shit. see what a dollar gets you at starbucks!
Because psychologically, using a pre-paid voucher and paying out of pocket, even for the same product at the same price isn't the same. It probably is a sunk-cost fallacy or similar illogical factor, but the willingness to consume something where I've already is much higher - it removes the mental friction of calculating, "is this really worth it." Because for any given article the answer is probably, "no it is not worth $1 for me to spend 5 minutes reading this article." But the same aggregated calculation of pay $10 for 10 articles, or whatever, probably does pan out because I'm able to value the investment in my personal enrichment. I'm not paying for 5 minutes, but rather I'm paying for insight and relevancy. Or support independent journalism or whatever.
I really think something like integrated Apple pay on click would work for someone on mobile.
"1 dollar for today's issue."
I think the problem is that they’d be afraid that letting people pay without signing up for a subscription would drastically cut into the money they make from people who subscribe with the intention of canceling it but then forget and end up accidentally paying for a subscription for months.
As a consumer, I say: gosh, what a shame.
That's Matt's point though. All this competition is good for consumers from the narrow standpoint of making content cheaper. It is terrible for the industry of journalism though.
We briefly talked about this in intermediate macro: too much competition can compete away profits, kill innovation, and hurt consumers.
That's a good point. Occasionally, usually in sports, there will be an article I want to read. I'd happily pay $1 to read the single article. Why not? But they insist I sign up for a subscription (typically with a super cheap entry fee, which I pay). Then I forget I subscribed and three months later angrily cancel.
Then the next time I want to read an article I don't subscribe because I know I will forget.
Just let me pay the $1 (or $0.50) and I would be happy
You're describing my relationship with the Athletic over the past three years. We're in a tumultuous cycle.
My eyes mis-scanned that as Atlantic, and it very much still works.
I regret the $60 I gave to the Atlantic, but their best features are totally worth $4 or buying one at an airport news stand.
I feel the same. I'm in Phoenix and at times I want to read articles from big daily local papers in my region (SoCal, Nevada, Mtn West States) and it makes no sense to plop down $10-$20/mo for a subscription, but I'd gladly pay $0.50-$1 to access an article, but that option is precluded so I go elsewhere. It's like journalism needs an NBA League Pass that protects the local market, but lets you access out of town content at a reasonable price.
This is exactly what happens to me with several publications.
I wonder if a larger portion of sales being buy-once would dissuade publications from writing clickbait (grabbait?) headlines that are obviously BS once you read the article. Or if it would encourage it, for that matter.
Seems like it would encourage it, to me. :-/
I work at a small business that is funded based on annual memberships and offer a mix of free public content and paywalled, more expert content. We offer alternatives to the annual membership but none are very popular.
I think the idea of an alternative to a subscription is more attractive than the reality.
That is probably good for the casual user - but economically it would generate less revenue. Ben Thompson does a great deep dive on bundling https://stratechery.com/2017/the-great-unbundling/
I thought the company Scroll was a great idea. Like Spotify for the open web - pay every site you visit a fraction of your monthly subscription. Unfortunately they went belly up after a year.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/28/21111865/scroll-ad-free-website-subscription-launches
They do. The model for several newspapers and magazines is that the first few articles per month are free, and then there's a paywall after that. If you find yourself repeatedly hitting the paywall, that's a motivation to subscribe.
The past few places I've lived have had free independent weeklies that specialize in the local music and arts, but also bundle some mix of more general interest local news and editorial.
I think one way they do it is with a very small, low-paid staff. This blog is a good example of the scale. Imagine MY hiring a DC music beat writer, and ad-sales guy and bundling up all his weekly content with a more local bent and I think you get a similar output.
Even at Slow Boring the roles of copy editor and researcher were merged into a single position after Claire and I left
Heyo don't put the blame on me now 🙃
I'm assuming that the new person has the talent and efficiency to do what once took two people to do? 😁
Nope, the real difference is that I'm just full time!
Availability is a talent
You didnt leave if you spend all day in the comments...
I walk among the people now
I for one appreciate that you have dedicated more of your time to the posting of takes.
Where does Will Stancil fall on this spectrum?
But weren’t you a combination of Ben and Maya to some extent, Milan?
I think a big part of the problem is that local news is really boring. You read it if you don’t have any options but it is hard to compete for attention with hot button national issues let alone with social media and other entertainment. It used to be cheaper to produce and so you got it as filler which and it turns out to be good when people are forced to eat their “broccoli”.
Indeed there are parallels with this information diet and our super surplus of highly tasty and satiety real foods today. We have produced “better” products than is good for us. See also, bowling alone issues.
I think this is one of those things that’s true right up till it’s not. I mean like I wouldn’t think school board politics would be very interesting and yet we have moms 4 Liberty. We have people who think a Ruby Bridges biography is way too racially progressive for their school as a semi national movement.
All the National news with its brimming culture war have their local instances but like it’s up to some entrepreneurial person to get it noticed and make a fuss about it.
Except it makes sense. People's ability to invest in their interests have become much more targeted and specific. So you have people get really into wine, LARPing, video games, board games, British royalty, Korean pop, Bollywood, etc. There are now the resources to go really deep into people's preferred interest which also enables them to avoid other things that are less interesting to them.
So for people who are REALLY into school boards, they can get into it. But for everyone else who finds it boring, they can focus on their own niche. Specialization is like fire, powerful and dangerous.
This seems to be pretty good news for something like a substack or other small overhead business model and pretty bad news for keeping a huge overhead for a generalist publication. I would be more interested in having local government substacks for ~100 dollars a year or whatever than try to revive the business model of the Tribune company.
I agree, with the exception that getting 10k subscribers out of 300 million is much easier than getting 10k subscribers out of a much smaller population. In theory its more relevant to locals, but advertising a substack is much harder than advertising a newspaper - if for no other reason than most people know what a newspaper is and I'm not sure most people know what a "substack" is.
I've help with charity fundraising before ... it is almost always much easier to find a few people willing to write a $10k check, than 100 people writing $100 checks. And it isn't just linear function of dealing with more people. The interactions often require just as much convincing and cajoling for the lower amounts ... often even more effort!
If criticizing people speaking giving prepared remarks, from your stage at your event qualifies as nutpicking well I think we have a profound disagreement about what’s entailed by that term.
It wasn’t something some rando said even extermeperaneously at a pattern it was part of the official program and they’ve had many years to distance themselves from it and say no no we mean books like Gender Queer not books with such extremely divisive lines such as, and I quote “Black people and white people can be friends.” I happened to teach this curriculum and it’s hot garbage but it’s not racialist at all it’s very much in line with the traditional understanding of racism as about personal animus.
Like they put this person on their own stage, and stand by their remarks so I’m skeptical of the view that as a movement it is limited to more extreme content. It’s not somebody’s TikTok or X post gone viral.
A representative of Moms 4 Liberty has explicitly stated that she opposes the statement or concept that "Black people and white people can be friends"?
A Google search suggests that statement is part of a sentence that appears in the book, "Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story” by Ruby Bridges, and that Moms for Liberty has challenged an elementary school curriculum unit called “Civil Rights Heroes,” which includes the Ruby Bridges book. This Daily Kos story, however, specifically states that the complaint filed by Moms for Liberty *didn't* mention that quote: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/12/1/2066974/-Critical-race-theory-Nah-these-racists-want-to-ban-kids-books-about-the-civil-rights-movement
Not the quote directly but they attacked a second grade curriculum containing this book.
https://youtu.be/Di9wLBofRV4?feature=shared
And this one https://youtu.be/MRfy2xs8Xpg?feature=sharedp which are both very much not any kind of modernist interpretation of racism. It is very literally a direct quotation of one of the two books and is representative of how the book dealt racism. In a speech at a convention I saw on You tube the mother was concerned that it asked children how they would feel if they were Ruby.
Local news is not boring... on television. It's a popular product even now. But the signal to noise ratio is low there.
I don't often watch the local news, but when I do, I'm shocked by how little is there.
"The median length of a story with video on local television, according to PEJ’s detailed studies of the medium, is 41 seconds, and some critics have complained this is too short. The median length of a network TV news package was 2 minutes and 23 seconds."
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2012/07/16/video-length/
And it's mostly inane "live reporting" from in front of the police station, breathlessly telling the audience that the cops are looking for the perp of a string of burglaries or something. Local TV news is right at the bottom of the barrel of journalism. But people do still watch it and don't think it is boring.
Also there is a (small) subsidy to local print journalism. These local stations all have websites with local articles and horrible syndication and click-bait content. But they do have these longer-form articles. I wonder if there is a way to leverage that more.
"If it bleads it leads". You're basically describing why local news has a "conservative" bias and why Americans estimates of crime is usually wildly higher than in reality (if I'm not mistaken even within their own cities, Americans will say their neighborhoods are safe but other neighborhoods are where are the "bad stuff" happens).
Reminder, if we are talking about gun control America is a horribly violent country, the shame of the developed world. But if we're talking about normal Americans being worried about the murder in their neighborhood, they're just whining Karens who don't understand how safe they really are. Now back to discussing why news is failing in America!
It’s both true that American violent crime rates are higher than those in many comparable countries, but not constantly rising the way that many people always seem to think they are.
I don't know who Daniel Penny is, but I think you're describing the situation the past few years. But people have thought crime rates were increasing for my entire life, even though they were decreasing for the majority of my life. That's not about Democrats or Republicans - that's about people having inaccurate perceptions of crime.
How do we balance the fact that Americans estimate of crime is usually wildly higher than in reality, and also that violent crime in America is also an extreme outlier relative to the rest of the developed world?
By acknowledging that most of the crime is concentrated in areas the median American doesn't go, and committed by people the median American doesn't interact with. That's how people can be "objectively" right that our homicide rates are terrible, and that most Americans are "actually" quite safe and unlikely to be he victim of a crime, so they shouldn't be so worried and convinced that their neighborhoods are under siege.
If you remove the "outliers," then America looks about as safe and peaceful as you would expect from other parts of the developed world. But, it should be a national tragedy that "large" swaths of the country are "outliers" like this. I think it's also tragic that the laws and policies of the past 75 years encouraged exactly this sort of segregation into the "Haves" and Have-nots" based on the neighborhoods people can afford to live or move to.
"If you remove the "outliers," then America looks about as safe and peaceful as you would expect from other parts of the developed world."
I don't think this is accurate. If you remove American "outliers" then you would need to remove outliers from other comparable countries, and once again you see a significant separation occur.
Rural areas in the US are more dangerous than rural areas in other developed countries, uban cities are more dangerous than urban cities in other developed countries, etc.
All that being said, I agree with your underlying point about the outlier areas in the US being a national tragedy.
The US has a much wider variance in the distribution of violence though. So if you remove the worst urban areas from both the US and peer comparisons the US only comes across as 2x worse, rather than 5-10x. It shows how severe the "violence gini coefficient" really is within the US.
Random thought: I wonder to what extent the widespread adoption of term limits in state and local governments has contributed to making local political news less interesting to most people? I.e., if you live in a town where Mayor Jones can keep getting re-elected for the next 40 years, are you more motivated to pay attention to news coverage of local politics than if Mayor Jones is going to automatically be barred from running for mayor after no more than 8 years?
I think this is absolutely true. Term limits are the reason that I know that Willie Brown is the reason the California legislature has term limits, but I can't name the current speaker of the California assembly. I can also name many of my local politicians but not what positions they currently hold, because they swap to another whenever they get termed out of one.
I think local politics feel boring if you're not actually paying attention. Here in Chicago the local politics are an endless source of... entertainment? despair? I'm not sure, but they're certainly not boring if you actually bother following along. Most people I know just have no interest because knowing a lot about local politics doesn't make them sound erudite the way listing off senators does.
I think Axios Local has a good take on this. Instead of broccoli you get a daily multivitamin. They publish 5 mini stories each day instead of a full paper. Which is honestly about how much noteworthy stuff happens in a city. “Mayor says we should fix potholes” only needs a paragraph or two.
One way you could increase coverage of local news is bundling. Have a large reputable written news organization hire local correspondents in the big cities across America and then sell access to WaPo or NYT local that gives you the ability to read their local coverage from any city.
This is a much more compelling value proposition than subscribing to a local paper. Most of us now have connections to multiple locations -- we went to college in one city, grew up in another and have family in a third. Without this kind of bundling I have to pay, say, $5/month to have access to local news in just one of those cities. With bundling I can pay the same amount and get access to local news across the country (and often there will be art, pop culture or some weird event stories of interest in cities I don't even have a connection with.
Right now local news is basically like a cable company trying to sell access to channels a la carte. Each channel has to charge alot to fund it's content from the few subscriptions it gets and you end up with few profitable channels. You bundle the channels and the value proposition is compelling for lots of viewers and everyone wins.
(I know it's counterintuitive that consumers are made better off by removing their choices ...I didn't believe it myself until I tried working through some example math).
Substack is perfect for local content. Why pay for copy editors, printers, and ad sellers when all that has become useless crap? Ten thousand subscribers can support a substsck with 3 or 4 journeyman level writers. Most cities have 10,000 people who will pay $8/month for local news.
Great for opinion not so great for news. No one author can cover everything and subscribing to enough authors to get anything like relatively complete local news coverage/analysis is financially unworkable.
Substack (unless they add bundling) works on a value proposition where a small number of people who get really high value out of most things an author creates support the author. News (even local news) works on a model where very large numbers of people get a little value from having access to the content produced by many journalists.
Worse, because of that the cost of personally vetting the reliability gets out of hand. I read the NYT and trust them to make sure reporters do basic fact checking. I couldn't remember all those reporter's names to tell them apart from crackpots if I wanted to.
A former journalist who lives in my town has in fact started a substack trying to be hyper-local! We'll see how it works out for him. I don't think it is a full-time job (or paycheck), but a decent side hustle given he likes to keep up with town news anyhow.
What's the Substack if you don't mind me asking?
My town is small enough that I don't want to reveal my location that precisely!
Also see what it did to Hersh. He was a good journalist when he had editors that held his feet to the fire. Moving to substack turned him into a crackpot willing to repeat lies (likely from Russian agents). His skill is sensing something fishy (and there was just not what he said it was) cultivating sources by forming relationships not doubting them.
I think a fair number of people would say Hersh was a crackpot long before moving to Substack. Wasn't he pushing 9/11 conspiracy theories at one point?
Yes and that OBL was actually machine-gunned by Pakistani intelligence or whatever it was.
This was the big one I was thinking of. I actually remember where I was when I read it and I was extremely confused about what was going on with him and double checked if he was who I thought he was.
Yes, I should have been more specific. It turned his supposed journalistic output crackpotty. He's personally been kinda crackpotty for awhile but that's exactly why having editors matters so much -- the talent for developing a source and judging what's likely true don't always go together (probably often the opposite).
Yeah I was going to come here and say that maybe Substack could help. Recruit a strong, trustworthy local journalist to start it up, and interested people can fund it. Somebody to cover local government, somebody to cover local business, somebody to cover high school and local college sports, etc.
DC Crime Facts, which I learned about here, is a good example of this. I'm not sure what the pseudonymous writer's paying job is, but the newsletter is free (and excellent).
There are a few cities that now have a local substack, one of the first (and the one that's been franchising the model to other cities) is Manchester Mill: https://manchestermill.co.uk/
The thing about bundling is that, mathematically, it will involve one entity subsidizing another.
Not necessarily. Ben Thompson has written extensively on the conditions where bundling can increase benefits for both consumers and producers, and he has an entire section of newsletter archive dedicated to it, https://stratechery.com/concept/business-models/bundling-and-unbundling/
For a concise example in the context of the cable bundle, I'd recommend Chris Dixon's "How bundling benefits sellers and buyers", https://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-and-buyers
Building on that example, Thompson elaborates on how the internet has broken that model in legacy media while recreating it in streaming services like Spotify in his article, "The Great Unbundling", https://stratechery.com/2017/the-great-unbundling/
I think it's hard to apply that bundling model to local news though.
In the example of bundling sports and history with ESPN and the History channel, the sports fan values sports more than history, but they value history SOME.
If I bought local news that comes bundled with other local news I don't care about, that isn't adding value. As a sports fan I might want to watch some documentaries occasionally, but as a Cleveland resident I'd never be like "oh sweet, the state fair is coming to Sacramento!"
Yep. The historical bundle was the local newspaper that included national news, sports, classified, etc. in addition to the local news. Following the "Great Unbundling" of the last two decades, consumers have better and cheaper options for each part of the newspaper bundle, which leaves local news lacking in a business model.
That was my reaction when I first heard this idea but it turns out to be false. When you work it out the reason it works is because people often get a small but non-zero value from access to many sources but unless you're an airline you usually have to pick one price everyone (both ppl who just get a bit of value and those who get alot) pays.
For instance, with cable channels maybe I love the discovery channel and I'd pay $10/month for it but there are 99 other channels that occasionally have something I like on so I'd pay maybe 9c/month to have access to each of them. Suppose there are 10,000 customers each of whom have their own (different) favorite $10 channel (distributed uniformly) and for whom the others are worth only 9c a month.
Now let's say the channels are offered a la carte. Each channel sets a price. If they pick $10 they get 100 subscribers (the ppl w/ that as their favorite) and get $1000/month. Lowering their prices doesn't pick up new subscribers until they hit the 9c price point because it's only worth 10c to everyone else. At the 9c price point they get 10k subscribers and earn $900/momth. So the a la carte price ends up being $10 a month for each channel and everyone gets one channel.
If instead the cable company offers a 100 channel bundle for $15/month then all of us sign up because we get $10 + 99*.09 worth of value ... about $19. If that fee is shared out equally then each channel gets $15,000 /month.
So literally every single individual and supplier in that market was made better. So it's not subsidizing in the usual sense. Sure it's not likely that every local affiliate is literally exactly equally situated as in my example but not hard for no one to be worse off than w/o bundling.
But the thing about local news is that it's local. I get my local news with my cable package, but if I got EVERYONE's local news that would not add value to my cable package.
I get your concept. I have live tv (technically youtube tv) mostly for sports, but hey if something piques my interest on HGTV I now get a benefit and HGTV gets extra eyeballs.
But there just aren't scenarios where I get a value add by checking out some local news that isn't where I live. On the rare occasion something becomes worthy of interest, it'll get picked up by national news.
Well you certainly aren't hurt by having access to other local news -- it doesn't take much effort to set your address to indicate your primary feed. Certainly it's not as important to me as local news where I live and I don't follow all the stories there.
And maybe it's not something you want but I frequently find myself reading local stories from other locations when they are
1) some crazy human interest story from some random city. Local dog saves cat from drowning.
2) Are 'local news' in that they cover some local artist or fashion trend or event where I find the subject interesting.
3) Cover some event that informs me about problems facing government/transit (Philly is building a new mass transit system and it's very cheap or expensive) or are just shocking: for instance Chicago's scandal selling rights to ticketing cars.
4) Cover local news where I went to college, used to live or where family and friends live.
5) Give local background to a story with national importance. For instance when Puerto Rico went bancrupt learning about what's going on with their economy or learning background about how Texas's energy market worked re: big freeze or what it's like to live in the really poor parts of Appalachia or the fracking bomb towns. The national news gives the basic story but not always the local background.
6) Relate to something someone mentions in a discussion on substack or Facebook.