The reality is this: Building an audience basically requires you have a lot of new content. Daily? Multiple times a day? Anyway, a lot.

And that's not how original reporting from one human being works. https://twitter.com/mvzelenks/status/1343947204940103681

Original reporting is slow. It takes time to interview people, collect information, synthesize what's going on in your head and write something engaging and deep. (You can do original reporting fast, but it's not usually in-depth stuff. It's like "thing happened" type stories.)

This is, in fact, why publications employ more than one writer at a time. (Those of us who have mostly worked on small staffs know there's cool stuff you can't do because you have to balance quality and quantity.)

So any journalism platform that focuses on an individual (particularly if it's built on a social media style setup) is going to inevitably be mostly research notes, analysis, opinion, essay, etc. Because one person can't turn out enough original reporting to build an audience.

And that’s not to say Substack is bad (some of my best friends are Substacks!). It’s just that, idk guys, maybe what it does well is not THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM(TM) but a nice blogging platform.

IDK guys but maybe you don’t want the future of journalism to be every man for himself ... because again, that is not a path to the magic combination of depth + audience. You need a team to get both simultaneously.