The goals are to:
- Reward old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism. Find the next James Fallows, the next Chris Arnade, the next Sam Quinones.
- Reward people who serialize major projects on line, rather than going through the book process
- Reward people who engage in high-level discourse, fighting the trend toward what Tyler calls “Twitter economics”
- Discover, promote, and compensate talented commentators. Find the next Scott Alexander, the next Matt Yglesias, the next Coleman Hughes
Think of this idea as a cross between a multi-author Substack and Tyler’s Emergent Ventures. Think of a producer/editor (me, for example) having a stable of 100 contributors, each of whom contributes on average one essay or podcast about every 20 days, for a total across all contributors of about 5 a day. All contributions would sit behind a single paywall, as in a newspaper subscription. Perhaps it could run on Substack, with the editor handling the administration involved in managing and compensating the contributors.
Each day, a subscriber would receive a newsletter with 200-word summaries of each of the daily contributions, along with a link to each contribution. Assuming 100,000 subscribers each paying $100 a year, that would allow for average compensation of $100,000 a year to each contributor (less after paying for overhead expenses, such as payments to Substack if we were to use that platform).
At first, we would have to get some established contributors to bring in subscribers. These contributors would have to be willing to be paid less than the value of the subscriber base they pull in, so that there would be funds for the new talents.
The editor’s job is to filter contributors, not each individual contribution. As a contributor, you produce your essay or your podcast without interference. The editor acts as an adviser. I would be willing to be an editor without monetary compensation, but as the project scales up there would be paid editors.
I do not have the connections to be able to find enough contributors to pull this off myself. But I think I could with the help of others (Reihan Salam? Tyler?)
It is a project that could scale up with more editors. It is hard to know in advance whether revenue is maximized with one giant bundle or with different bundles based on topics or channels or user-defined packages (it’s like the Cable TV pricing problem in that sense).
At sufficient scale, this project could invade the space of major news media, the advertising-based models of news provided by Google/Twitter/Facebook, and university presses.
Sign me up.
There is a conflation here of “old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism” and “talented commentators”. The journalism is difficult, time-consuming, expensive and desperately needed, while the commentary is inexpensive and nearly infinitely expandable.
The problem is the economics of commentary vs discovery(news) and the lack of any boundaries between.
Without some additional technique to effectively defend against the variety of “cancellation attacks”, it is not possible to publish intellectual arguments that stand a chance of having a positive influence.
If they start to pose problems for the cancelling crowd, the authors become targets for extortion and intimidation, and focal points for attacks which keep expanding in concentric circles of social associations and going upstream in terms of management or cut offs of necessary infrastructure and services.
For example, how does one enforce solidarity and loyalty in a prisoner’s dilemma when 99 members of a group are incentivized to disassociate themselves from one, newly-radioactive individual? It is one thing to say, “Hang together, else we will all hang separately.” But when the 99 all believe they are clever enough to stay on the right side of the line, it won’t be hard to tolerate a purge.
Or just to bail oneself, or recruit a mutiny, “We can no longer be members of this club because it tolerates this bad person, so we are all forming a new, bad-person-less club now under new management, and you had better ask for your money back from the old club which now cannot provide what you thought you were paying to get.”
And *this* would be the time when the pay-for-news model wouldn’t devolve into cheap sensationalism just to keep the subscription dollars rolling in. You want good commentary, you have to take money out of the equation.
I’d subscribe to it.
Journalism is an inherently irresponsible profession. They are more properly called paid gossips. There were never any shoe-leather kind; at best only the illusion of such.
A few pages of the first newspaper are on the internet. It covers topics which are none of the readers’ business. Events they either cannot or should not affect, plus a few events that, if the reader is affected by them, the reader would already know about.
Free speech => inexpensive speech => you get what you pay for.
The useful version of this activity is called spying. What you want to pay is a spymaster.
O who can ever praise enough
The world of his belief?
-Auden
I hate to be negative here, but this is beginning the sound like a plan to somehow keep the s**t out of the sewer system.
Will send you a non-refundable $100 right now just to help finance legwork. say where
Salary expense is the largest, but not the only expense, in ‘shoe leather’ journalism (my father made this mistake when running his now defunct newsweekly). I also think we are getting the journalism people want, since the metrics-driven delivery would allow existing players to see trends in what people are reading and react accordingly.
The only non-magazine news publications I see (as opposed to things like Quillette) that I aren’t following the “more pundit” path are business-focused ones (Bloomberg, WSJ, FT). Perhaps it is about what readers follow the news for? I don’t follow sports pubs, so can’t speak to them, but there seems to be a resurgence in those online as well, and aren’t they mainly punditry and explainers?
Yup – looked at the UK’s newspapers quite some time ago now (sparked by just how dire the local rag had become – and it wasn’t that great to begin with). The titles that seemed to consistently generate some sort of profit were essentially “papers of record” in specific domains – which boiled down to the FT and the Racing Post, basically. And they do not have large readerships, compared to the other nationals.
Not convinced Arnie’s idea is a runner – see the other post after this that just boils down to “he who shouts loudest wins”, which’ll skew the pool of contributors, particularly if there’s no editorial line.