We know there are two models that work for financing media jobs right now. The first model is to work for a print legacy institution that was well-positioned to weather the transition to digital and is now flush with subscription money. Unfortunately, only three of those exist: The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. And at this point any time a writer comes along who shows some promise, the eventual “promotion” to one of these three organizations is inevitable.
The other model, of course, is to go independent with Substack. I have questions about the long-term viability of it because it seems like the main people who can make Substack work full time are those who already have large enough audiences that they may not need Substack—10% of subscription revenue is a big cut and there are other options out there for such writers. On the other hand, the smaller Substack newsletters, which is an overwhelming majority of them I expect, will struggle to provide writers with a FT wage.
Here is what worries me: One thing I’ve learned from being in Lincoln is that when you don’t build institutions, things that don’t need to be difficult can actually be quite challenging. There has been a large homeschool scene in Lincoln for around 40 years. But if you’re the parent of young children today, there is only so much benefit you can draw from the fact that people 20 years older than you homeschooled their kids.
Why? When you homeschool, you don’t really formalize much of your work at all, often because it is so tailored to your life situation, and so the work terminates on your own family. This makes it very hard for others to benefit from it. And so if you are a young Protestant family in Lincoln right now, you have mostly the same weird school options that my parents did when I was growing up:
Amongst people my age (I’m 34 and have two school-age kids with two more that aren’t yet in school), this has resulted in a lot of families saying “none of the above” and starting something new. So we have a ton of startup schools in Lincoln right now, one of which our family is part of. Some of these startups are going to make it and some of them will not. That’s life when you’re in the start-up phase. Omaha is in a similar state, though they have a classical Christian coop-model school that is well ahead of anything we have in Lincoln.
But ten years from now it is probable that we’ll have some kind of Charlotte Mason school in Lincoln, some kind of classical Christian school in Lincoln, and probably some kind of Montessori-inflected Christian school in Lincoln, and maybe one or two other schools with their own unique model. So in another decade, I expect the school situation for Christian families in Lincoln will look quite a bit healthier simply because we finally started building institutions instead of just opting out of institutions altogether by homeschooling.
So it is with media. If you’re paying a Substack subscription, you’re basically paying a writer’s wage. In a few cases, you’re also helping build an institution—looking at you The Dispatch, The Bulwark, Common Sense, and The Pillar—but mostly you’re paying Freddie de Boer’s salary or Matt Yglesias’s salary or Anne Helen Petersen’s salary. And that’s great! I’m glad those writers have a tool like Substack that allows them to make a good wage while having a high degree of editorial control and independence.
But when you’re simply paying a writer’s wage, the thing you’re paying for terminates on the individual writer. Just as with the private home schooling family, the benefit doesn’t really build over time or aid in the building of some new institutional vehicle for transmitting an idea or achieving some kind of goal.
On the other hand, if the only institutions that are viable are the Big Three, then how do you actually grow and mature as a writer? These three publications have a finite number of jobs, especially entry level jobs. And if you’re competing for those jobs with kids who have grown up in elite circles, have an Ivy League degree, and so on, what chance do you have? How do you get your foot in the door to the industry? How do you find a job that gives you the time to make mistakes, learn, and improve in your craft?
The answer right now seems to be “Substack,” plus freelancing. But then you’re still going to need other work to pay the bills. What we need, I think, is a renewal of small magazines that are all successful enough to pay their writers well enough that more writers can make a living via freelancing, likely from a mixture of Substack revenue plus publishing a few pieces a month at magazines that pay well. If we could have a half dozen thriving magazines in four or five different political blocs, I think the writing ecosystem would start to look quite a bit healthier.
So that’s the media-side problem. For me, though, I’m a Christian magazine editor, and so there is also a religious ecosystem problem that I am concerned with. In the much discussed David Brooks’ editorial on evangelicalism, Tim Keller listed out the project for renewing conservative Protestantism in the US:
So here’s a helpful exercise to do: Let’s link up these tasks with the four ecclesial offices we mentioned in a previous post as a way to identify who can help address these issues.
To review, the four ecclesial offices are deacons (responsible for mercy ministry and physical care needs within the congregation and broader community), elders (responsible for spiritual care of the congregation), pastors (responsible for preaching), and doctors (responsible for theological education within the church and broader community).
Now let’s list out the eight items.
Now another question: What institutions can help us do these things? Obviously local churches are the foundation—that is where people hear the Word of God preached, receive the Eucharist to nourish and sustain them on their spiritual journey, and where they receive the counsel and aid needed to live the Christian life on a day-to-day basis.
But there are some things here that local churches are not equipped or set up to do, I think. So we also need schools, colleges, and seminaries as well as homeless shelters and outreach centers, and, finally, publications to further help us do these things. This post is mostly concerned with media, so in what remains I’m going to focus on the items involving doctors in the church not because I view the work of the other offices as unimportant, but simply as a way to focus what remains and keep this from getting even longer.
Items 1, 4, 6, and 7 from Tim’s list are the ones that will require the greatest support from educational institutions and publishing institutions to address, which is where most doctors of the church should be working, either professionally or bivocationally. And here these two institutions should be working together, supporting each other, rather than competing with each other for scarce resources or attention.
The difference between these two types of institutions is mostly one of scale. Schools can only sustain so many students. In the first place, their teachers can only teach so many individuals and in the second place once a school becomes too large, it starts sliding toward bureaucracy and the kind of institutionalization that is the death of real education. In the second place, because of the importance of face-to-fact interaction and personal knowledge, schools should also be geographically limited rather than being predominantly online, in my opinion.
So both of these factors constrain how broad a school’s reach can be. That said, what schools lack in breadth they can and should make up in depth. The opportunities for a teacher to shape and form students across several years of relationship with them is immense and won’t be replicated by churches or publishing institutions.
On the other hand, publications will not be able to match schools for depth, but we can far exceed them in breadth. I do not have access to any graphic software at the moment or the desire to learn a shareware version, but you can perhaps picture what I’m describing as t-shaped chart. The horizontal axis refers to the number of people an institution is able to reach. The vertical axis refers to the depth with which an institution is able to reach individual people. Publications do the horizontal axis. Educational institutions do the vertical.
To put it in practical terms, Mere Orthodoxy has been reaching roughly half a million people annually for the last several years. During that time, our annual budget has never been larger than $30,000 and most years it was far less than that. This is scale that no educational institution can match. And while our costs are higher these days due to our expansion into print, we still scale far better than any educational institution could ever hope to without compromising its product.
This strength of scale will continue to apply as we grow for the simple reason that my work load and costs do not grow at the same rate as a teacher’s would as their class size grows. If a teacher has to grade work for 30 students instead of 15, their work has doubled, or close to doubled. At minimum, their grading work has doubled.
But if our print subscriber base grew from 450, which it is now, to 4500, my work would not grow tenfold. Our costs would go up because we’d need to pay our fulfillment vendor more to manage our subscription list and we’d have to spend more on printing to print that many copies. But for my part, I’m still sending a check to two vendors every month and coordinating issue launches with them, and that is true whether our subscriber base is small or large. Otherwise, I’ll still be editing, writing, and reading a pretty comparable amount to what I am now even if our subscriber base grows dramatically. I will just be doing it from a position of more financial security than I have currently and with a couple other people full-time to help make the magazine better. Even so, we’d be reaching people at a cost to scale ratio that no other institution we’ve discussed in this post can match.
To borrow a metaphor from an admittedly fraught source, there is something to that idea of the ground war and the air war. But unlike Driscoll, I’m not proposing that a single church or single man take on responsibility for all of this. Rather, I’m proposing that schools and congregations take the lead on the “ground war,” by doing their work on a local level in specific churches and schools while publications can manage the “air war,” side of things by using the internet, where distribution costs are basically zero, and print media, where distribution costs are higher but still scale better than educational institutions can ever hope to do, to reach broad audiences.
One more note about the benefits that publishers can offer: Because the internet changes media distribution so radically, it makes it easier to encounter new or foreign ideas. There are plenty of downsides to this, obviously and I’m fairly critical of those in a number of places. But the benefit of this for the church in a non-Christian society is that even as our public standing falls, the ease with which people can access actual Christian ideas has grown. If you are a non-Christian or a deconstructing Christian, going to church may feel risky, possibly even threatening depending on your history with Christians. But reading something on the internet costs you nothing financially or socially and is in many ways basically private.
This means there is enormous potential for publications that use the internet well to reach an audience that would otherwise never encounter Christians simply because they don’t encounter them in their day-to-day life nor do they have any associations with local Christian congregations or schools.
It is entirely possible that the way people eventually end up visiting a local church in the years to come will often begin with institutions led by deacons or doctors—either through mercy outreach and anti-poverty efforts or through online publishing. Indeed, I know of one local case of a young man who had apostatized who began his journey back to the church via listening to Jordan Peterson’s Genesis lectures. And I’m quite confident he is not the only one with such a story.
Anyway, this has gotten quite long and perhaps would work better as a podcast. But I’m wanting to continue to use the blog as a venue for this kind of writing—too chatty and informal and under-developed for an essay, but reflective of some thoughts-in-process I’m having now and that I’d enjoy being able to discuss with readers as they are able and interested.