Whither Substack? Not long ago it seemed as if every journalist I found interesting was migrating to Substack and setting up a paid-subscription business. This has meant that I have to budget and choose pretty severely, doing without writers I’d like to follow.
One very successful Substack experiment has been The Dispatch, a magazine-like site where a subscription gets you a large cast of writers, not just one, for your subscription. In the interest of my pocketbook I’d hoped to see more of this as Substack matured.
But this morning I read this from The Dispatch:
We’ve been working behind the scenes the past few months to improve the way we provide you with our editorial offerings. Our partnership with Substack—the innovative company that created this newsletter platform—has been incredibly fruitful over the years, but given our robust growth and the ambitious plans we have for the future, we decided early this year to build up our own online presence.
So it seems that, having succeeded well, they’re leaving to set up their own platform. It looks as if my hopes for Substack as an affordable journalistic medium may be farther away than ever.