Inbox ARMAGEDDON

Everyone you know has a Substack. How did that become your problem?

- BY MATTIE KAHN

The emails promise two installments per week, with a chat function and commenting privileges. There are vows to include exclusive reporting or coveted sale codes or personalized recommendations. Several proffer eternal gratitude for the low cost of $5 a month!

You think the fee seems reasonable—even appropriate. Work, after all, deserves compensation. And who doesn't like the sound of an unmediated relationship between writer and audience? (Besides editors. And fact-checkers.) But then the emails keep coming. Five bucks a month becomes $10, then $20. Your inbox is bursting at the seams. Forget back issues of the New Yorker, your shame is now an unread stack of newsletters. It turns out Ronald Reagan was wrong about the scariest words in the English language: There are four, not nine: “I’m starting a Substack.”

In March, Substack—the preferred online newsletter service of the chattering classes, home to both venture-backed media companies like the Free Press and individual enthusiasts who all seem to have discovered the same pair of $900 pants at once—announced it had surged past 5 million paid subscribers. Its co-founder Hamish Mckenzie attributed the growth not just to the collapse of mainstream media, which has driven journalist defections from once untouchable institutions like CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, but also to the platform’s new emphasis on video and audio tools. Now influencers who might once have generated TikTok content for free can do it on Substack and hawk their haircare tutorials or Joan Didion-inspired close reads for a price. Tina Brown has joined them, riffing on private jets and Meghan Markle. Nate Silver and Plum Sykes are there too. The marketplace is crowded, and the hustle is constant.