On Substack -- with reference to Ted Gioia

Like many I am reading more on Substack, though as of yet I am not a paid member of anybody's Substack. By contrast I subscribe to a lot of periodicals. Here's a list:

• Paper
• The Economist
• The Atlantic
• The New Yorker
• Online
• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• The Washington Post (no, we haven't yet cancelled)
• The News and Observer
• Triangle Business Daily

I don't read all of them all the time. I also have given money to The Local Observer and, more recently ChapelBoro/WCHL, the first in the form of regular donations and then, in response to an impassioned plea from the editor, a larger check. Both of them have published my financial column. In the case of the ChapelBoro, it is "paid content," meaning I pay them to publish it. Not a ton of money, but a little, on a one-year trial basis to see if it's worth doing from a business standpoint.

So we spend a lot of money on print journalism. I spend a lot of my life reading the stuff and think it's important. Journalism organizations themselves provide a lot of superstructure that is important to getting good work done, from supporting long-form investigative journalism (a guy in my co-working space at Business Insider just spent a year or so working on a long series of articles on the various knock on effects of datacenter buildouts in support of AI) to promoting local businesse etc. News organizations play important roles in communities at various scales.

Substackers like Gioia do a lot of good work too. But the fact of the matter is he wouldn't have risen in prominence as quickly as he has of late in the absence of boosts from more traditional media orgs, like the profile in The Atlantic recently or even the push he got on the splash page of The Free Press a few weeks back. But he doesn't seem to employ any editors, senior or junior, nor does he seem to promote local restaurants, etc, important functions of traditional media organizations.

He also doesn't really write full paragraphs. Instead, he embraces the breathless Tiktokification of one-sentence and quasi-one sentence paragraphs promulgated by LinkedIn. If he wants to be taken seriously as a writer, I think he should show enough respect to his readers to offer them properly baked paragraphs. Moreover, he could offer comment space so that people can give him direct feedback instead of taking up valuable time writing to him on their own blogs, like this. Or maybe Substack just doesn't offer that functionality to those on its platform out of consideration for our fragility. I'll have to check on my Substack.