As the left, construed broadly, is slowly realizing that so much of politics is downstream of the information environment, we have to start thinking seriously about how to fund a more favorable information environment. Ana Marie Cox gets at what I think is a fundamental problem with Letting a Thousand Substacks* Bloom (boldface mine):

Substack readership doubled in the first three months of the pandemic.

This growth disguises the long-tail distribution endemic to creative platforms. Today, more than 300,000 creators on Patreon have at least one paying member. Collectively, patrons spent over $800 million a year on the platform in 2020. But while the company won’t disclose the average monthly payout per creator, many are making only hundreds of dollars per month. There are over 75,000 Substack newsletters; according to the company, just over 17,000 writers “get paid.” The company emphasizes the 50 publishers making over $1 million a year; one analysis looked at the other 99.7% of publishers and guessed that the average profit was about $16,000 a year…

Subscriptions are a luxury; only the most dedicated political observer will continue to pay for 10 different newsletters. Many others will settle for just the least-worst institutional options and a personal favorite or two. A trend story in the New York Times asked the question of how much people are willing to spend a year on a bouquet of newsletter subscriptions, and found dedicated readers having to re-evaluate their ability to support as many authors as they wanted to. Newsletter proprietor and subscriber Aminatou Sow offered some hard, realistic advice: “People are hoarding digital products, drinking from a fire hose of this content…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.”

If everyone has to cobble together their own constellation of individual creators, $5 at a time? That’s not a media ecosystem. That’s a privatized patchwork of tip jars. Counting on people who pay you directly isn’t the same thing as not having a boss. You have 100 bosses, and you can’t afford to piss off any of them.

I do think there’s room for a left-ish pundit ecosystem that would be supported by broad left. But note the key word: pundit. Gathering news, reporting in depth, detailed analysis and the like are simply not possible or sustainable by individual journalists. Those require far more resources and time–and, frankly, a little more resiliency against disgruntled readers.

Tomorrow, I’ll (time permitting) have more to say about this.

*Shouldn’t be using a site that platforms fucking Nazis, by the way.