Trust Me with Rachel Parker | What COULD the Future of Online Journalism Look Like?

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Rachel Parker @msraitchetp   (Post)

Substack had negative revenue - The Verge

Substack gets writers to invest, but doesn't share new financial info

Intro:

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Last week: I beat up on the news business and the baseless nostalgia the old guard loves to bathe itself in as if we don’t notice that journalists, and the newsrooms where they worked, were largely white, straight, and male.

I also talked about how journalists I follow and trust are nearly in unison on one point: The ancillary income that newspapers and news outlets make from Google is going to go away due largely to advancements in AI.

I watched an entire generation of journalists fail us in the early part of this century. There were two trains running in my view that led to this: an utter lack of innovation and hubris. If you tell yourself that your industry is so valuable that wayward consumers will always find their way back to you, you’ll never be bothered to pay attention to what consumers are actually doing. 

The slow leak in the newspaper industry is already terrible, and a thriving democracy needs journalism.

Outside of nonprofit newsrooms…what should they do? 

The two things that we have today that still pose as “saviors”: aggregation models and the newsletter business. Let’s talk about the second one first. 

The writing is probably on the wall for Substack. In 2021, it lost $25M. There’s a story from The Verge in the show notes from April that details how the Substack founders failed to raise another round of investment capital from VCs and instead, crowdfunded more money. I posted a pretty great article from Dan Primack in Axios from April about that. Both are worthy reads, because they basically tell you something we should all know: The independent news boom is probably in trouble. 

And we can all imagine why. How many of us can really afford to subscribe to numerous Substacks? It starts to add up, and most of us already have other premium content products that we pay for monthly. (name some)

News outlets have, for a long time, had what I’ll call an “aggregation”  mindset. Push stories where people are—search, social, YouTube—and the money will come.

My idea: Build an overlay payment system that allows individuals to pay for individual stories that will rival the cost of an ad impression AND deliver immediate value to the publication.

Describe Post and why, as much as I like it and use it, I’m worried it won’t work. (See also: Apple News)

BUT…the micropayment feature is magnificent. Let’s expand on it. 

(Explain that, close it up).

I don’t have a Big Ask for this week. Just enjoy the rest of fall. 

Credits

Trust Me with Rachel Parker is a production of Mid Map Media LLC, producers Rachel Parker, Adam Sommer, and Sean Diller.

Host: Adam Sommer 

Find Adam on tik-tok  (maybe) and bluesky as "midmapdadenergy" - follow The Process on instagram. 

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Outro Song: “The World Is On Fire” by American Aquarium 

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