Digest 1/4/2021

Newsletters, the op-ed industrial complex, Lord of the Rings, and more.

WELCOME BACK! TO NEWSLETTER DISCOURSE

Substack solidified its position on content moderation three days before Christmas. In short: it won’t remove or censor content unless it is in clear violation of rules forbidding harassment or hate speech. The platform’s founders had already made their position on the matter clear in interviews, but now it’s set in stone on the site. The ethos of Substack is that the creators themselves cater their content to their readers, who are paying those creators directly. Substack, reiterating that it is not a publisher, would like to stay out of that equation as much as it can, a goal that runs counter to taking a more active role in moderating content published on the platform.

I found it interesting that, reading the post, you’d think critics had been clamoring to restrict the sort of content published on Substack, and the post was the founders’ attempt to push back. “We will resist public pressure to suppress voices that loud objectors deem unacceptable,” the post reads. But has there been public pressure from loud voices to suppress Substack writers’ speech? As far as I can tell — and I’m speaking as someone who has been following the platform closely for years — there have been only reporters and media critics (like Clio Chang in this CJR piece, and me in this newsletter) asking very fair questions about how the company plans to handle content moderation as it hosts controversial public figures like Andrew Sullivan on the platform, especially considering it is offering advances and benefits to some of the writers it hosts. 

The founders of Substack have sidestepped this quandary by insisting (like certain other tech companies) that Substack is a platform, not a publisher, and that writers on its platform do not work for them but for their respective readers. The $250,000 it paid to Matt Yglesias, per Anna Weiner’s New Yorker piece, is nothing more than an advance, in exchange for which Substack keeps 85% of the profits in the first year. By that logic, a writer is accountable only to their readers, and their readers will set the tone for their content and any moderation thereof. It’s a utopic setup that conforms perfectly to the ideal of where new media is headed — writer-owned, subscription-based, reader-centric — but I don’t think it’s a reach to predict that it’s only a matter of time before some controversy puts that model to the test. Welcome to the media in 2021!!!

Speaking of persona-based media, here’s a Washington Post examination of how newspaper op-ed pages became the “outrage-generating machine” of 2020, from Joseph Epstein’s “Jill Biden is not a doctor” piece in the Wall Street Journal to Tom Cotton’s call to “send in the troops” in the New York Times. For one, Paul Farhi of the Post points out: “Reporting is expensive, requiring an investment in professional reporters and editors; opinions are cheap.” 

But it also seems part of a broader strategy to grow subscriptions by peddling individual writers — newspaper company McClatchy set about intentionally growing its opinion journalism after finding it to be a driver of subscription traffic. And a hate read is still a read. How many times has a deranged Bret Stephens column been widely circulated on Twitter?? Trolling is the inevitable model of opinion journalism. 

LONGREAD OF THE WEEK If you found yourself watching confirmed Christmas series The Lord of the Rings last week, have I got a longread for you. In 2001, on the eve of the Peter Jackson film adaptation’s premiere, Jenny Turner wrote in the London Review of Books about the epic’s enduring popularity and the dearth of substantial literary criticism about it; Tolkien’s anti-modernism and literary theory; and the deep longing in the series for a world that is realer and more magical than our own (“a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief”). “It is a work written to keep the modern world at bay that the modern world adores,” Turner writes. — Erin Schwartz

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Today in Tabs is BACK FROM THE DEAD. The daily newsletter from Rusty Foster that in 2014 was called the “high school cafeteria of New York media” has returned, this time (obviously) on Substack. We’re now living in the golden age of email newsletters, and Tabs was ahead of its time. Welcome back, Tabs! 

— Here’s a look at how Trolls World Tour changed the movie business. It was the first film of the pandemic era to be pulled from its theater schedule and sent directly to streaming, to enormous success. In doing so, it set a precedent for pandemic releases to come.

— Joyce Carol Oates proudly took credit for intentionally slamming a bathroom door in the face of poet Emilia Phillips. 

— Sasha Issenberg pointed out that the Times is now “60% newspaper, 40% fanzine for New York Times enthusiasts.” Sick burn! The Times, which published internal newsroom notes for a special section, has been increasingly selling a community experience to subscribers. 

— Alden Global, the second largest newspaper company in America, is seeking to buy Tribune Publishing, the third largest. If the deal goes through, more layoffs (Alden has already carried out mass layoffs) are inevitable. 2021 could be a(nother) dark year for local news.