Writing about the failure of patron-supported journalism is itself a kind of confession. It hasn’t worked for me, and I struggle to weigh my guilt around that (should have worked harder!) against what I know is a structural problem. Patron-supported journalism (including newsletters) is both a throwback to the earliest mode of media production and, as it exists today, the newest way for capitalism to suffocate dissent.
Obviously, there have always been audiences, and always been audience members willing to pay a little extra for a creator to keep kith and kin together between gigs. There have always been writers trying to piece together a livelihood by appealing to deep-pocketed friends.
But over the past decade, especially the past five years, several corrosive trends converged, and now an unprecedented number of individual journalists are trying their hand at earning a living, one $8/month subscriber at a time. Those trends are familiar to TPM readers:
- massive layoffs and organization closures in the journalism industry
- continued siloing and polarization of political news
- billionaires personally directing the coverage to curry favor with those in power
Outright government suppression of free speech may be the boot on the neck of a body that was already halfway to the ground.
An under-discussed force in felling the journalism industry is the emergence of platforms standing to make a profit as the middleman in the writer-audience relationship. They profit from the churn of creators, taking a cut whether or not those creators make a living wage. The myth of independence is part of their marketing. Journalists like myself have been primed to believe this.
As clicks became the primary metric of success, journalists and writers at legacy publication were put in charge of monetizing their own traffic. First, with video and then through the push to be “public-facing” on social media. We became our own brands, and then corporate consolidation and private equity liquidization brought on the “mass extinction event” in digital media that’s still shaking the ground under our feet. As newsrooms shuttered and the number of staff openings shrank, newly unemployed journalists went independent because they had to. “Please subscribe to my newsletter” became as familiar a sign-off to messages announcing a job loss as “some personal news” was to posts sharing a new role.
In 2019, Substack used the brute force of six-figure advances to bring on established journalists and became the default newsletter platform for those already in the news business. The pandemic accelerated adoption of all the patron-supported platforms. Patreon added 30,000 new creators in the first three weeks of March 2020. Substack readership doubled in the first three months of the pandemic.
This growth disguises the long-tail distribution endemic to creative platforms. Today, more than 300,000 creators on Patreon have at least one paying member. Collectively, patrons spent over $800 million a year on the platform in 2020. But while the company won’t disclose the average monthly payout per creator, many are making only hundreds of dollars per month. There are over 75,000 Substack newsletters; according to the company, just over 17,000 writers “get paid.” The company emphasizes the 50 publishers making over $1 million a year; one analysis looked at the other 99.7% of publishers and guessed that the average profit was about $16,000 a year.
How many of those people call themselves journalists? Well, that’s one problem: Some of them probably don’t, but are. Some of them do, but aren’t. The New Yorker recently did a profile of a home design influencer-turned-anti-vax activist — Jessica Reed Kraus — making a million dollars a year on Substack who now styles herself an “independent journalist.”
I am not here to gatekeep what Kraus calls herself; her success, however, illuminates how the patron model splits the creator economy into haves and have-nots with even more ruthlessness than the corporate model.
Individuals trying to support themselves via subscriptions are as dependent on the whims of the marketplace as those working for large corporations, and it’s not just the lack of health care and 401ks that make the career of a patron-supported creator precarious — it’s the rawness and immediacy of the relationship.
In a system where your income depends on performing as yourself regularly, at scale and on schedule, the temptation to shape yourself to what’s rewarded is impossible to resist. Kraus’s journey has the same general shape as other progressives-turned-reactionaries, such as Matt Taibbi, but I don’t think the problem is merely one of ideological temptation: It’s the exhaustion of being a brand ambassador. Leaning into comfort is human. The job is to always be available, consistent, charming, relatable, emotionally honest, and never boring. To succeed as a sole proprietor, the face of the brand, is exhilarating. To fail means you have failed as a person.
That feeling — of inadequacy, of vanishing — is baked into the system. It’s not a glitch. It’s how patronage works when it’s filtered through capitalism. The harder you have to work to sustain yourself, the harder it is to keep asking the big questions that can create political change. (This, in addition to the historically difficult problem of attracting anyone without generational wealth to an industry where the starting pay is so low.)
I’ve been watching the self-doubt creep in on friends, too — some of the most successful newsletter writers I know — who are now seeing their subscriber numbers dwindle as the economy contracts under the second Trump administration. Subscriptions are a luxury; only the most dedicated political observer will continue to pay for 10 different newsletters. Many others will settle for just the least-worst institutional options and a personal favorite or two. A trend story in the New York Times asked the question of how much people are willing to spend a year on a bouquet of newsletter subscriptions, and found dedicated readers having to re-evaluate their ability to support as many authors as they wanted to. Newsletter proprietor and subscriber Aminatou Sow offered some hard, realistic advice: “People are hoarding digital products, drinking from a fire hose of this content…Do you really need to subscribe to 100 newsletters? I don’t think so. Do you need to subscribe to 20 of them? I’m not even sure.”
If everyone has to cobble together their own constellation of individual creators, $5 at a time? That’s not a media ecosystem. That’s a privatized patchwork of tip jars. Counting on people who pay you directly isn’t the same thing as not having a boss. You have 100 bosses, and you can’t afford to piss off any of them.
And even if you’re beloved, you’re not essential.
Who does the slow work? Who gets to spend three months on a story that might not go viral? Many of the newsletters that support ambitious projects, such as Zeteo or, after a fashion, Bari Weiss’s Free Press, are just newspapers delivered by email. They’re institutions in disguise.
And we’re living in a culture that’s increasingly intolerant of hearing things it doesn’t want to hear. That’s more true on the right, but it happens on the left, too. If you want to practice journalism in that environment, you need either a broad, stable base — or a secure, protected source of funding. The patron model is neither.
The question we need to consider is not just “how does good journalism survive” but how can journalism model survival? Personally, I believe the way forward looks like collectives and worker-owned publications. To survive in late capitalism will take being anti-capitalist in practice in form and not just as a critical stance.
Anyone else remember the song “Mr. Tanner”? A baritone who loved to sing made a living cleaning cloth and “Practice scales while pressing tails”.
Music was his life it was not his livelihood.
It made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good
He sang from his heart and he sang from his soul
He did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole.
The concern is “Parton-Supported Journalism” merely selling people what they want to hear and read?
Or in the alternative is truth your guiding compass.
If it is the former and there is an afterlife, may you join Rush in hell.
If it is the latter and you want to be a columnist or journalist, expect to need a second job.
But that is a difference between the right and the left. If you are supporting policies that benefit billionaires, you can be wrong 1,000 out of 1,000 and still make a nice living. But if you are like people who subscribe or otherwise comment on TPM, you don’t have a patron saint and therefore like me need a second or day job.
The truth is if truth is your compass, then you should expect no glory or wealth for your work.
Thinking about the current state of journalism, I am reminded of an article about Emil Zola, a great French novelist from the 19th century yet mostly known today for a newspaper article/letter J’ACUSSE (I accuse).
While he began his career as an outsider, Zola had become recognized and had settled into a life of society having been accepted by French high society because of his popularity with the masses that made him famous and rich.
When desperate Madam Dreyfus came to his house begging for help, Zola first had her physically thrown out. In the course of events she had dropped some papers that she wanted to show him that she claimed proved her husband’s innocents. While picking the papers up with the intent of throwing them away, Zola read enough of them to know Madam Dreyfus was right, the papers proved her husband’s innocence.
Zola hesitated before deciding what to do next. He had come from poverty and was at first ridiculed and hated by those in high society but now was living the dream having been accepted by French aristocracy. For a moment Zola thought someone else should take up this cause but Zola also realized Madam Dreyfus had been to everyone else and for the very reasons he did not want to, nobody else would take her cause.
Zola would give up his comfortable life as a member of the highest of French society and spend several years in exile for writing J’ACCUSE. It is widely believed he was murdered for it.
The only column I pay to read is from Paul Krugman who won a Nobel Prize in Economics before becoming a journalist. Zola likewise was famous before writing J’ACCUSE. In fact becoming a journalist cost Zola his comfortable life and eventually his life. Furthermore for every Paul Krugman or Emile Zola there are 10 Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh’s.
The point is if you are going to be a journalist who guiding compass is truth, do not expect to be rewarded with fame and fortune. Rather, expect to need a second job.
The thing is, old time journalists didn’t do it all by themselves, in general. They had camera operators, they had research files and shared resources/tipsters/etc.
One person by themselves is duplicating all the administrative and print functions that a big organization could cover. There’s no one to collaborate with, imagine Woodward without Bernstein (we can actually, it’s not entirely the greatest thing in the world) or Josh without Kate.
Gifted writers like Ana or Digby or Paul are gems among a growing pile of rubble, we don’t get full stories, all the threads of corruption and fascism from this bunch of sociopaths but once in a while, but we do get “influencers” aka propagandists, like Loomer.
News needs help. And people like Bezos need to not be in the owners box.
Good journalism needs a support structure. Reporters need to be paid a living wage and supported so that they can research and report without a daily deadline. They need editors, fact checkers, lawyers, support staff, everything a Newspaper or Network provides. News coverage cannot be dependent on always making a profit. The old system might not be perfect but it is better than what it is devolviing into.