When I taught writing for a local homeschool coop the place we always began wasn't the mechanics of writing, but more the formation of writers—how do you become the sort of person who actually has something to say? (I made my students do the onion exercise from Capon's Supper of the Lamb in which you take one hour to slice up an onion—I wanted them to slow down and pay attention to something they'd never ordinarily notice in any level of detail. Then I had them write about it. Remarkably, I never received any complaints or even confused questions from parents.)
Much of this formational work can happen independent of one's economic life—as a student and in your early career years you should just spend lots of time reading, observing the world, listening to lots of different voices and viewpoints, and so on. Find two or three favorite poets. Get a few favorite novelists. Become rounded as a human thinker.
But, of course, at some point if you want to write well the time required to do so will mean you've got to figure out the economic side of the writing life.
For many years, what this usually meant was getting an intro-level job as a beat reporter for a local paper. You did that for awhile and had a relatively low-risk space in which to learn your craft, to learn from more experienced people, and because the "platform" was simply that newspaper's subscriber base you didn't need to worry about building your own platform. Indeed, such a thought would likely have been unwelcome in most newsrooms because the way good work happened was through people uniting together to build and improve the newspaper, not through all the individual producers each attempting to lift up themselves. All my early writing jobs were newspaper jobs, actually—and I did everything I could, editorial writing, compiling "agate" which meant the prep sports statistics we'd run once a week, column writing, game briefs, feature stories... if someone at the paper wanted me to do it, I did it.
Of course, the story of how that era ended is well told at this point. Newspapers thought their main value proposition, in economic terms, was the news, but in reality it was the distribution of information. Getting information to a mass audience was hard and complex. Newspapers had a monopoly on the infrastructure needed to spread information. The internet broke that and the newspaper industry was largely done for after that.
Since that time, there hasn't been a great answer for how writers can make a living, particularly entry-level writers who didn't already have a large platform that they could monetize somehow.
Substack and the broader email newsletter phenomenon has begun to address that problem by solving the monetization problem. It used to be very hard to monetize writing at all. When I attempted to start a soccer email newsletter in 2014, I had to hack together a payment solution and labor through Mailchimp to make everything go. Substack (and Buttondown) have solved that problem.
That said, the outcome of this is that we now are in a writing economy where there is a conflict between the material incentives of individual writers and the incentive of media institutions. The likely casualties of this conflict will be significant.
Two stories illustrate the problem. First, I learned recently from a friend who has moved into the paid newsletter space that they make substantially more from their personal newsletter than they ever did in legacy media. That isn't surprising, necessarily, but it also creates some potential problems.
For example, having seasoned, experienced journalists and writers working within our media institutions makes those institutions better. But if you have a career journalist with a decent audience who can plausibly build a paid newsletter list with mid to high four figure paid subscribers, it's going to be extremely hard for any media institution to afford that person. So the media institutions are weakened by the absence of veteran writers.
At the same time, the situation for entry- and junior-level writers is somewhat fraught for different reasons. To begin, junior-level writers will observe the people making five figures a month on Substack and think "I can do that too." In 99.9% of cases, however, that isn't true. Nearly all the big Substack winners I know of are people who had large platforms that they took with them to Substack. Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Matt Yglesias, Anne Helen Peterson, Freddie deBoer, and Lyz Lenz have done well on Substack. In every single case, they were established journalists with large audiences. If that isn't you, then building a career out of Substack is going to be a very long haul and there's a good chance it will fail.
The reality is that getting to a place where you have enough paid subs to make a living is very challenging. This is because subscription fatigue is a real thing and most people who subscribe to online media are more likely to sign up with people they know than with new writers. Realistically, you're probably going to convert something between 3% and 6% of your free readers to subscribers. So even if you got to where you had a free list of some size—10,000 people, let's say—that probably will translate to well below a thousand paid subs. At a very optimistic 6% conversion rate, you're talking about 600 people, each paying $6 or so per month. Then you factor in Substack's 10% cut and the money you have to take out for taxes, and there just isn't enough left for most folks to live on. So this creates a complicated dynamic for entry-level and mid-career writers: The established institutions probably won't be a reliable, stable employer for the reasons we already gave. Making a living on Substack will be hard. So how do you make it work? Probably you cobble things together, creating multiple revenue streams for yourself from your writing. You make what you can via email newsletters. You find a magazine that offers steady, reliable work either in an actual FT capacity or perhaps simply as regular, fairly predictable freelance jobs. Then you freelance on top of that. Maybe you try to sell a book.
This brings me to the other media story on my mind. A magazine I follow recently fired one of their editors. One of the suggested reasons I heard for the decision was that this editor's employer felt they were writing too much for other outlets rather than for the magazine that employed them.
On the one hand, that's a totally reasonable demand for an employer to have of an editor; even if their primary job is editing rather than writing, they should write somewhat regularly for the institution that actually pays their bills.
On the other hand, see everything said above: Media institutions are floundering so working for them means living with a high degree of professional insecurity. At the same time, personal newsletters can offer significant paychecks to writers who already have a large platform when they establish their newsletter. So that early- or mid-career journalist looks at all of that and says "the best path to economic security for me as a writer is to write for tons of outlets and use that to build my personal email platform, which I can eventually monetize and use as a secondary or even primary income source—there's even a chance that I could actually become genuinely wealthy (by creative economy job standards anyway) with a bit of luck."
So that's what writers do. And when a media institution fires them for that behavior, it simply reenforces the lesson: You can't count on media institutions to pay your bills. So if you're a writer, your best path forward is to build your own platform.
What we end up with is a writing economy in which the economic incentives push hard against the older newspaper values of institutional deference, patience, putting in your time, learning your craft, etc. Instead today's economic incentives push writers toward individual platform building, anti-institutional behaviors, and so on.
In short, we have a writing economy that is almost lab-engineered to produce lots of noise and lots of writers willing to do whatever it takes to rise up. Our current economy actually discourages slowness, reflection, and care because writers need those bylines and magazines need stories filed and amidst all the rush there isn't time for slower conversation. We have a writing economy that is entirely concerned with the mechanics and economics of the writing life, and that is almost completely blind to the formational aspects of the writing life.
What we have, then, is a writing economy that actually tears down our democratic life as a people rather than building it up—and when one considers that traditionally a free press is one of the chief tools for constructing and preserving democracy you hopefully are able to grasp how dangerous that is.
