Media

Substack moves beyond newsletters

Seven years since its launch, the newsletter platform Substack has consolidated its dominance of the independent news business. Now, it’s trying to position itself as something more: a central platform for paying creators of all kinds, untethered to the news cycle and beyond the tough-to-monetize medium of text.

The company’s accomplishments are remarkable: Its recommendation network is responsible for 50% of all subscriptions and 30% of paid subscriptions, offering a strong argument for why writers should use Substack rather than technically similar but smaller competitors like Ghost and Beehiiv. The company told Semafor that live coverage on Substack of major news events, such as President Joe Biden leaving the presidential race and the presidential debates, have spiked subscription revenue by millions for its publishers.

And while it’s lost a few high-profile creators over its refusal to kick fringe or offensive voices off the platform, it has added more and now dominates the attention of media elites and political junkies, with channels spanning Bari Weiss’ Free Press and Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, the Never-Trump site The Bulwark and the anti-establishment leftist outlet Drop Site News. When top journalists left the Washington Post and the Guardian in recent weeks, Substack was their obvious destination.

The company still isn’t profitable on an annual basis, and declined to say how much revenue has grown since it was reported to be a modest $9 million in 2022. But Substack has added more than a million paid subscribers over the last year. News content continues to account for the company’s largest segment of subscribers, and it has more in the pipeline.

To avoid fizzling the way competitors like Medium have, Substack is trying to become less a journalism platform and more a payment system for creators.

In recent months, the company has been reaching out to influencers, video creators and podcasters to convince them to join the platform. It doesn’t need beauty influencers, say, to all of a sudden become bloggers. But it does want to be the primary vehicle for backing creators regardless of medium.

The pitch is simple: YouTube and other platforms do not generate meaningful revenue for the vast majority of creators, and other ways of making money like brand deals can be inconsistent and subject to volatile ad market trends.

AI comes for the screenwriters

The new Robert Downey Jr. play McNeal explores the line between originality and theft, human creativity and artificial intelligence. Playwright Ayad Akhtar told us on Mixed Signals that he thinks some of the most obviously creative professions may be the first to be transformed by large language models.

“If you think about the sort of corpus of text that you have with any given television show, and 90% of what’s on TV is some version of a formula, whether it’s children’s TV or whether it’s procedurals and Law and Order or whatever,” he said. “You have thousands of texts that can be inputted into the bots and that can then generate endless variations.” Akhtar said that what the bots lack in originality, they make up for in “dexterity.”

Listen to the fascinating (and AI-enhanced) conversation, and subscribe to Mixed Signals for more.

Harris and Walz face the nation

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are hitting the national media circuit this week in the first major blitz of their eleventh-hour presidential campaign.

On Sunday, the popular podcast Call Her Daddy dropped its interview with Harris, as did CBS News’ 60 Minutes. Harris will appear in a Univision town hall and sit for interviews with The View, Howard Stern, and Stephen Colbert. After an appearance on Sunday with Fox News, Walz is slated to appear on Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show and in local media in key states. Walz will also appear on the SmartLess podcast this week, Semafor has learned.

The ramp-up represents a shift in strategy for the ticket, which has been slower to book media appearances than Trump and his running mate, JD Vance. And there’s some evidence it’s working.

Democratic-aligned polling firm Blueprint conducted an online survey of 5,764 voters from Oct. 1-3 in which it presented respondents with clips from Harris’ recent interviews with Oprah Winfrey and MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle. In results first shared with Semafor, Blueprint said that at least six in 10 voters responded positively to each clip shown from the recent interviews, and particularly to Harris’ economic message.

What they’re reading in the eye of the storm

Political news is still breaking through in hurricane-hit North Carolina, according to an analysis of reader data among the major newspapers owned by McClatchy in the state last week. The research, by CinqDI, an Advance Publications-backed reader insights platform, focused on non-college-educated white voters over 40 and nonwhite voters under 30, two key voting blocs that could tip the state for Harris or Trump in November.

While coverage of Hurricane Helene dominated reader interest, the two voting blocs it analyzed had high rates of interest in some politics coverage, according to a memo first shared with Semafor.

The most-read political stories across North Carolina last week focused on the governor’s race, particularly the scandal that erupted over Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s comments on a porn forum. There was little interest in stories about last week’s vice presidential debate.

The two top stories involved fact-checking: a story headlined, “Biden says Trump is lying about Cooper, NC Helene response. Here’s what’s really happening,” and an article explaining that a state election board’s removal of 750,000 names from voter rolls was routine maintenance.

The analysis included 972,000 pageviews by North Carolina news readers between Sept. 27 and Oct. 4.

Richard Esposito is a longtime journalist and author of the biography “Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told The Truth,” about the man he calls “America’s greatest crime reporter.”

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⁋ Publishing

London calling: Guardian media writer Jim Waterson left his post to launch London Centric, and the mogul who owns the Evening Standard, Evgeny Lebedev, clearly isn’t worried about it: “You’re ex colleagues tell me the general feeling was you are a prick, that sounds about right,” Lebedev posted.

Local news: A group of local New York journalists (present company included) are hoping to recreate some of what was lost when The New York Times decided to stop vetting candidates for local office. Now we just need a great Manhattan venue for a monthly breakfast, if anyone has suggestions. — Ben

✦ Marketing

From ads to IT: Accenture Song, the agency led by David Droga, is growing fast, which Brian Wieser attributes to the old agencies expanding their remit — in particular, “the ongoing focus by all marketers on IT services-specific marketing capabilities.”

DEI rollback: Adweek notes that, “with hot-button issues like reproductive rights and affirmative action at the center of ever more heated debates on TV and online, many brands are pulling back from initiatives that didn’t feel so risky two years ago.”

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