Does Substack harm journalism? Q&A with UCLA professor

Companies don’t need a high-tech product to be disruptive.

For the last few years, journalists have flocked to Substack and similar newsletter services like Ghost, Covertkit, and Revue to earn better pay directly from subscribers and bypass traditional editorial oversight in a newsroom. Former New York Observer journalist Emily Atkin is making north of $230,000 a year and while others like Steve Hayes are nearing $2 million. Substack has more than 500,000 paid subscriptions, and the top ten writers are collectively making more than $15 million a year, the company reports.

But what impact are these low-tech newsletter products having on journalism? While new publishing platforms have thrived, some fear they will lead to more problems, including Dr. Roberts, Associate Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles.

What’s the big deal?

Dr. Roberts gained Twitter notoriety for her analysis of how former journalists' use of Substack sidesteps important principles guiding news media and, as a result, threatens journalism.

The argument: Dr. Roberts, who is a leading authority on commercial content moderation, internet culture, and the intersection of media and tech, is concerned primarily a conflation of traditional journalism and Substack newsletters produced by former journalists.

Here’s the gist of her argument:

• A journalist earns clout from a newsroom, which is governed by editorial oversight and ethics.

• Readers grow to trust the journalist, who sees she can make more money producing the same content on Substack.

• She leaves the publication to launch a newsletter, taking with her the journalistic clout she earned to become an independent writer and importantly her own editor. In essence, she has become an opinion writer.

• The public recognizes her and signs up for the newsletter, not necessarily knowing that her content is without the same journalistic vetting or ethics.

Dr. Roberts' fears are simple. The blurring of lines between journalism and former journalists' newsletters — which often lack editorial oversight and are hidden from public scrutiny — will damage journalism and may lead to misinformation.

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To get more context on the argument and her concerns, I spoke with Dr. Roberts to learn more about her research and analysis. The following are excerpts from our conversation.

Can you tell us about the field of Information Studies?

Information Studies can include all sorts of interesting fields like knowledge management, information-seeking behavior, human-computer interaction, data science, sociologies, and anthropologies. My work sits at the nexus of the internet and society.

Can you tell us about your background?

For over a decade, I’ve studied the phenomenon of commercial content moderation. ... There has always been an adjudication and governance on the social internet, but it's typically been self-governance and typically been a lot more tangible to users. I realized that there was this new, nascent practice of paying people — often as an intermediary, third-party capacity — to look at stuff online and make decisions about it.

How'd you realize Substack and its analogs’ may be threats to journalism?

I’ve been watching the oftentimes melodramatic exit of many individuals — many of whom are journalists, some of whom are other public writers — from both the traditional news world and independent news media. … [Her tweet series on Substack] was a political-economic analysis. There were no particular individuals I was thinking about; it was analysis at a structural level.

What’s one of your top concerns?

What is really important to me and should be to anyone who wants to talk about this in a meaningful way is to dis-aggregate the corporate media ecosystem and any other media outlet from another thing called journalism, which is an institutional practice and a profession. Those things have to be separated. Part of the problem for me is that there’s a constant conflation of the two.

You argue the skirting of journalistic principles is also a concern. Why?

Norms and ethics are not immutable and they’re not infallible. Many times journalists, editors or entire organizations fail to live up to them. Yet these practices are fairly identifiable and understood by the general public. One can disagree with those norms and practices vociferously — and that disagreement should be encouraged so those norms and practices can be revisited, changed, better articulated, and better undertaken.

But when journalism-like work is done under other auspices, it becomes much more challenging to understand what those norms or practices are and then to potentially agitate for different ones. When a journalist moves from an organization ... but doesn't make a clear and clean distinction between the work she did as an investigative journalist and in a traditional journalistic setting and does this other thing [such as opinion writing in a Substack newsletter], that's also a problem.

You note that by Substack promoting and paying certain writers, the company is making editorial decisions. Can you explain what that means and its implications?

There’s a financial incentive at some level for some writers, and the fact that it’s not super obvious and easily disclosed is part of my point. In this case, Substack has gone from being a container, vessel, or dissemination tool to something else, which is a content provider. [A payment schedule] changes the nature of what the platform is, intrinsically. ... It chooses who it pays, and why. This changes the playing field

How might we address this concern as a society?

Stop having affective, quasi-romantic relationships with your tech platform of choice uncritically. You can like it and use it, but understand what it’s really doing. … In 2021, shouldn’t we be aware of outfits from Silicon Valley whose goal is to disrupt, move fast and break things, or to do no evil? How’s that working out?

What are your thoughts on the potential harms Substack and other newsletter tools present to journalism? Please share your comments!