TJ Walker argues journalism is not dead but transforming: platforms like Substack let writers monetize directly (example: Matthew Iglesias), enabling creators to earn substantial incomes. He also warns this model fails local news—loss of local reporting reduces accountability for local governments—while encouraging creators to build their own audiences.
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13,000 paying subscribers.
Over $1 million a year.
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Every few months somebody freaks out and declares journalism is dead because another newsroom downsized. Let's be honest, journalism isn't dying. It's finally cutting out the middleman. In the old days, great writers had to beg for a freelance gig or chase ad revenue scraps. Now platforms like Substack let audiences pay writers directly. No editors, no no gatekeepers, just the audience and the work. Take Matthew Iglesias, for example. He spent years grinding as a blogger and freelancer. Often brilliant, rarely well paid. Now his newsletter, slow boring, has 13,000 paying subscribers and earns over $1 million a year. Not because a media company approved it, because readers approved it. This isn't the end of journalism. It's journalism that actually serves the people who read it. And for once, the audience, not the algorithm, decides who succeeds. So this is a topic where I have debates with friends all the time who've been in the media world for decades and been in this circle I've been in before. So there's a lot of different ways of looking at this. And I apologize if I were overly glib there. There are some downsides to newspapers going out of business. Someone like Matthew Iglesias I gave as an example. He's talking about national politics. So you have a built in large audience. And if you get 0.00001% of the world, you still get your 13,000 subscribers because you've got a database of hundreds of millions of potential people. If you are in a mid sized town, God forbid, small town, and you want to actually know what's going on in your school board, there used to be a reporter for the local newspaper who covered that. No one's going to start a substack calling on the local school board members and covering what's going on and votes from the county commission with the hopes of making a living. It's too small of a database to pull from because of that. It means fanatics from across the spectrum can win elections and destroy school systems, or county commissions, or city commissions, or city government because no one's holding them accountable. So I realize I sound like I'm being wishy washy here. The first part of my commentary. I do think that there is too much hand wringing in that. In general, it's never been better in the history of humanity to be someone who's a creator. You can create podcasts, you can create YouTube channels, you can self publish books. It's great for people's creative impulses being able to make a living as a creator. It's the Best of times and it's the worst of times. But what is genuinely different is there is not this ecosystem and a business model where you can have a newspaper in one town and they can then hire reporters to cover the mayor's office and the city commission and the county commission and the school board and really cover the minute, the minutes of a meeting and hold people accountable. And if someone gives $150,000 contract to his brother in law on a county commission, it was that fear of the local reporter doing a little digging, doing a front page story, humiliating you that kept you from doing that. Nowadays you can do whatever you want in most cases because there are no reporters or very few local reporters. They don't have the staff to do investigative journalism. They've got to just take in press releases and rewrite them because they're trying to cover 10 agencies at once. So there is that lack of scrutiny. So it's a real problem government, not just in America, but across the world, because you don't have that economic driver of one newspaper with all that classified ad revenue that could then be used to hire reporters. Same thing with local TV reporters. I grew up a news junkie. I would watch TV news at least an hour a day from the early 70s until really maybe 15 years ago. I don't ever watch TV news, which means my eyeballs do not count for any local TV reporters salary. They can't monetize my eyeballs. That's good for me in that I save time. But it's bad for journalism. It's therefore bad for institutions that require someone holding them accountable, which is what good journalists do. So it is very much a mixed bag. But if I had a choice of being 18, 19, 22 years old today and wanting to be a creator versus going back to 1979, oh, today is much, much better. Because in the olden days you had to start off in some small town doing nothing but, you know, calling the morgue or the police station for news and going to school board meeting. I would not have been able to survive that boring, tedious part of the job. But that is how many great journalists started and how the next generation of investigative journalists who hold politicians and lawmakers and, and public officials accountable, where they're going to come from that I don't know. That's hard to do because increasingly we're seeing a nationalization of the media and everyone is looking through news through the lens of a national perspective of their team. If I go to my local Starbucks here in South Florida, where I live, the Only thing people are talking about is, is the political opinions of one particular American well known political newscast that's known for its ideology. I won't say which one. We don't have to get into ideology battles here. But no one has any idea of what the local school board did, the county commission, the city commission. I've never heard anyone in years of going to the local coffee shop the last four or five years, even talking about things like that. They're only talking about national politicians they hate because reporters and talk show hosts and commentators they see on national TV who have the revenue and the money and the advertising. That's who they're connecting with. So this is causing a huge, huge problem. My advice to you, if you have a passion for some ideas, whether it's as a reporter, whether it's as a novelist, whether it's as a creator, whether it's as someone who believes in making squishies and crafts or new oil paintings, start creating your own media. You certainly can't count on review from your local newspaper. Create your own substack. That's what you want to do. If it's primarily writing, write a YouTube channel, self publishing, publish books. We are in the era of the creator. There are going to be problems associated with it. Your local county commissioner, school board member can completely rob you blind and we're not going to know about it. But it's also a golden era. Someone like Matthew Iglesia is making a million dollars a year writing about serious, important policy issues facing his country. That's got to be a great thing. So try to focus on what you want to create. Package your creation in a way that people who like you, support you, value, you can pay. If you do that, you are essentially a type of journalist and you are journaling your creations and sharing it with the world, which is a good way to make a living.
