Substack: The Media’s Forbidden Fruit

Do you take a bite, or do you abide by media’s institutional power instead?

[From left to right] Executive editor of the Washington Post Martin Baron, former co-executive editor of Recode Kara Swisher, and executive editor of the New York Times Dean Baquet. Photographs courtesy of Álvaro García Fuentes and NRKbeta on Flickr. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 and CC BY-SA 2.0.

Note: This was originally published on Substack.

Working in media naturally curates for a special kind of self-centeredness, so it’s not really a surprise that media discourse is mostly preoccupied with… well, itself. Substack is just the latest item in the saga with a particular focus on who the company paid an advance to entice their arrival on the platform, many citing concerns over their unorthodox political views typically skewing rightward of the rest of liberal mainstream media. The platform’s intentions may appear sinister at first, but closer examination would reveal more complex dynamics at play that don’t necessarily suggest Substack morphed itself into a refuge for the ideological fringe on purpose.

One must first reckon with blogging’s whole raison d’être before such issues are confronted–the blogosphere was born out of a desire to bypass media gatekeepers, and much of it culminating into the creation of media conglomerates that embraced blogging as their signature style, Gawker being a prime example of that. The intention to compete with legacy media on the terms it set proved problematic to some, and it wasn’t long before writers either relapsed back into blogging or got subsumed into the…