Ep 387: Can Substack Save Journalism? + Viral Advice for Ignoring Your Phone

Right around this time last year, one of the big stories in the world of media was the announcement that the economist and columnist Paul Krugman was leaving the New York Times. I'm gonna load here on the screen for people who are watching one of the articles from around this period. You can see the headline was Paul Krugman on leaving The New York Times, and the subhead says, the paper wanted to take away his newsletter or make him write less frequently, he says. It goes on to summarize that Krugman was fed up with that. He felt like he was being pushed out, and he left. Now at the time, when this all went down last year, I took it as yet another example of this sort of slow motion dismantling of traditional media that we have been seeing during the entire era of the Internet's rise. I mean, in an age of digital distraction, the business model for traditional media is really struggling to compete. Right? Because on your phone, information is free, and distraction is powerful. And if you wanna know about your about the news, your phone can deliver you dozens of algorithmically curated takes that are reduced down to pithy tweets or compelling short term videos to make you feel like you're in the middle of all sorts of action. It's just more interesting and more accessible than a lot of traditional media. So it feels like the age in which experts like Paul Krugman attempt to make careful sense of events in the pages of print publications is rapidly disappearing and that in its place is emerging a world in which all truth and expertise are vanishing, all information is becoming entertainment, all realities are becoming equally valid. But then, more recently, I came across something interesting. I was having coffee with someone, who knows Krugman. And he told me, like, look, after the after the time, after he left the times, Krugman started up a substack, which, you know, you might think of like, oh, that's kind of sad. It's like the once famous TV personality now has the sort of low rated podcast or whatever. But here's what my source told me. No. No. You don't understand. Paul is killing it. His subscriber count rivals the Times' Sunday print circulation. He's really impacting the conversation. And according to my source, his earnings have leaped comfortably into the 7 figure range. This is interesting to me because so often, our narratives about the battle for depth in a distracted world are pessimistic. But in Krugman's tale, I see the glimmer of a perhaps more optimistic story line. Is it possible that paid email newsletter subscriptions might be the foundation on which we can build a new type of professional journalism? Can a distributed network of respected and expert thinkers delivering thoughts and long form essays offer competition to the nonsense and slop being delivered through attention economy apps? Or is Krugman …