Welcome back to In Media Res. I’ve been occupied with launching a new digital currency product, helping to sell various beer brands to the masses and, like most of us, spending a lot of time reading the news. Which brings us to today’s edition: a new way to pay journalists.
We’re going to look at some fundamental changes in journalist careers, particularly the rise of the newsletter and the role of fandom in growing a writing career. We’ll delve into the changing structure of media businesses and the striking parallels to creator fuelled platforms. Finally I will propose a new way to pay journalists that allows them to grow alongside the publishers they work for, just like how creators can grow alongside the platforms they make content on.
Let’s dive in.
The great newsletter migration
A trend that started in 2020 and is growing in 2021 is journalists of all levels moving to take control over their writing through their own newsletters.
Substack, the service I use to send this newsletter, is the most notable newsletter platform and has over 250,000 paying subscribers. Collectively it’s top 10 writers rake in around $7 million annually.
Those who utilise newsletters include big names from very different corners of the media world. Writers as varied as Glenn Greenwald, Casey Newton and John Ellis have all migrated from larger publishers to Substack.
Though their beats are distinct, the motivations are shared:
Freedom from editorial pressure
Freedom from algorithm pressure in social feeds
Theoretically no ceiling to growing their audience and subsequent income
The last point is particularly relevant. Just like no-code opportunities allow Roblox creators to start mini-tech companies with very little capital, Substack allows prominent journalists to create mini-media companies:
I’m not going to get to 10,000 subscribers anytime soon, but if I can work toward that over time, not only will I be in a position where I’m doing well for myself, but I’ll be in a position where I can create media jobs. I can hire someone to go out and do more reporting. I can hire an editor. I can hire a graphics person. I can start to — in this tiny, tiny way — rebuild a little of what has been lost and figure some things out for the future. That just seemed like a really cool bet to make. Maybe I can actually start a tiny media company out of this and do some really cool stuff - Casey Newton
Rise of the star journalist
An important context to journalist migration is the rise of the star journalist, and the different role journalists play in a fractured media landscape.
On platforms such as Twitter, audiences are resonating with journalists over publications. Journalists on social can be more personable, specific with their opinions and focused on key topics of interest. Magnetic journalists have rising online clout which is levelling out traditional publisher power. This is accelerating the movement of journalists from smaller platforms to larger publications. NYTimes has a habit of grabbing ascending journalists such as Ezra Klein fromVox, Kara Swisher from Recode and Taylor Lorenz from Business Insider. While all three writers are incredibly talented, they were poached not only for their output, but for the audiences they built on social. Each had become larger through their own channels than the publishers they worked for. This presents a significant challenge for smaller publications.
The death of the ad-supported publisher models
Another significant challenge for publishers is declining ad revenue. In 2019 (Buzzfeed) and 2020 (Vice) we saw ad-supported publishers forced to make huge cuts to staffing. These publishers have seen their ad revenue leak to tech behemoths like Facebook and Google, whose targeting capabilities are increasingly seductive for advertisers.
Meanwhile, despite drops in ad revenue, publications that shifted to focus on subscription models, like The NYTimes, are thriving:
This is fantastic for The NYTimes, but not so fantastic for their employees. Despite publishers leveraging quality to justify subscriptions over ads, the journalists generating that quality content do not see the upside of increased subscription revenue.
Funding the creators that grow platforms
Since I last wrote about creator funding, platforms are starting to see the importance of rewarding creators, and are doing so with increasingly direct funding programs.
Snapchat has the Spotlight Fund, Tik Tok started a Creator Fund and Instagram’s Influencer Badge are some examples of platforms recognising the value of creators in growing and maintaining their audiences.
A new way to pay journalists
There are increasingly distinct parallels to be found between journalists on publications and creators on platforms.
Like Roblox developers, a journalist’s contributions fuel world building - the more articles contributed, the more depth a publication has
Like Tik Tok they create content that gets widely shared with a mass audience
Like Instagram they aim to cultivate a large audience to regularly view their content
What if publishers support their journalists like social platforms support creators?
My proposal is a performance-led compensation structure for journalists based on the current creator model. Journalists would have a bonus structure tied to subscription revenue they generate via Substack style subscribe buttons on their articles.
Financial firms retain employees with a a mix of fixed income and performance based recognition:
A publisher could follow this structure, just with different value outcomes:
Journalists leaving publishers is a challenge that will only grow over time, and without compensation for the audiences they bring to subscription based publications it will become increasingly hard for publishers to retain talent. My proposal likely has a few holes in it (how do you recognise editorial work?) but borrowing from the innovative compensation structures of social platforms and Substack seems increasingly necessary for publishers to retain journalists.