2021: Het jaar dat de RSS-reader terugkomt

In 2020, nearly one-fifth (17%) of engagement among the top 100 news sources on social media came from sources that NewsGuard deems generally unreliable, compared to about 8% in 2019. NewsGuard found that its top rated “unreliable” site, The Daily Wire, saw 2.5 times as many interactions in 2020 as 2019. Bongino.com increased engagement by more than 1700% this year.

The durability and sustainability of the digital-newsletter model remain to be seen. Carving out new ways for writers to make money from their work is surely a good thing: the United States lost sixteen thousand newsroom jobs this year, and many mainstream publications have struggled to overcome issues like discrimination, clubbiness, and prohibitively low compensation. But whether Substack is good for writers is one question; another is whether a world in which subscription newsletters rival magazines and newspapers is a world that people want. A robust press is essential to a functioning democracy, and a cultural turn toward journalistic individualism might not be in the collective interest. It is expensive and laborious to hold powerful people and institutions to account, and, at many media organizations, any given article is the result of collaboration between writers, editors, copy editors, fact checkers, and producers. McKenzie, the Substack co-founder, assured me that the platform should be considered only “one of the models alongside others,” pointing to the potential for worker-owned coöperatives, nonprofit newsrooms, and state-funded media. 

The future of news media is one in which we deliver more than what subscribers think they paid for. We compete with not only other similar news media but every kind of frictionless and dynamically adaptive content experience that users get from all the other content apps on their phones. As always — for better or for worse — excellent journalism, even the perfect customized mix of journalism, isn’t enough anymore. Ideally, like Samantha, we need to learn how to anticipate a specific kind of content need and develop an adapted editorial product for it: the capacity to offer our journalism in a content experience suitable to any (ideally all!) of a user’s needs.

My prediction: Credit card companies will add a news subscription to their mega-bundles. If American Express can offer their users a one-year subscription to the Calm app, why not a one-year subscription to The Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, or your local McClatchy paper?

Recent concerns over how our algorithmically curated news feeds are calibrated may drive users back to interfaces that allow hands-on subscription management, filtering, and sorting. It turns out we don’t want to live in our inboxes all day. The glory days of blogging may be making a comeback, if writers are landing on a viable monetization strategy beyond exploiting user data or ads. They’ll just need a place to land that’s not as cluttered as our inbox or as noisy as our social feeds.

Reporting on not just Substack, but Patreon, Cameo, Twitch, and OnlyFans, I find myself struck more by the similarities than the distinctions between the entertainers, artists, digital professionals, influencers, and journalists who populate these platforms. Though we like to consider ourselves distinct by dent of our craft’s supposedly elevated calling, journalists are really just creators by a different name.

So, given that this seems to be the emerging reality, we need to begin to prepare accordingly. What will journalism look like when its most influential practitioners prefer to go it alone? Who loses when publications are forced to vie with lone writers for eyeballs? What happens when the media unbundles so thoroughly that everyone competes with everyone for everyone’s attention?

Right now, I believe we’re in a honeymoon period, with many independent journalists still starry-eyed over the promise of digital platforms like Substack, Patreon, YouTube, and more. But the more journalists become digital creators, the more they’ll become subject to the type of struggles mainstream influencers have been dealing with for years.