Here’s a thought: where is the journalistic outlet that has variable pricing by writer?

Substack has exposed how underpaid the best writers are by legacy publications. The internet makes it very easy for them to pull the rip cord, taking their audience to  platforms where they can charge market rates for their content. 

But Substack does have some shortcomings vs. Vox, NYT, etc. Despite “stack” being in the name, it isn’t a full stack solution, really. It, and other internet platforms like it, offers some important features, while missing others. Here’s what I mean:

As far as I can tell, the legacy outlets are fixated on a very specific business model around a guild mindset. Raise revenue from ads/subscriptions at a fixed rate, and spread that across the newsroom. Some writers might get paid more than others, but the best writers covering the most popular subjects are clearly subsidizing the worst writers and the least interesting content. This revenue is also spread around the organization to engage in building out the resources to market content, edit writers, provide a chaotic open slack channel for disgruntled journalists, cultivate/maintain a reputation and defend a professional moat. Part of this moat used to be geographic dominance by local papers, and now is more about ideological affinity and listicles.

I am being a little harsh, I know.

What if a news outlet that offered all of these mostly great services blew up its revenue model and instead actually paid writers what they are worth by letting the readers set the price? It might result in greater overall revenue for the outlet, would result in higher customer satisfaction, would make it easier to retain writers, and would encourage better resource allocation by focusing on stories that matter to people most.

Of course, a writer would still be able to make more on Substack or Medium or whatever. A news outlet would need to take a cut off the top from writer revenue to fund the editorial, marketing, corporate development etc. It would inevitably be a higher percentage than Substack because Substack isn’t offering as many valuable services. And that’s ok! It would force media companies to focus on providing the best editorial, effective marketing, lean organization, smart strategic growth decisions and cultivation of a storied reputation that would make people want to bring their customers to the news outlet rather than go it alone. And with the internet, this can be done rather easily in a way that could not have been possible before.

Inevitably, this would mean jettisoning coverage areas that people don’t care about. Might that be bad? What if Americans just want to read Paul Krugman rant about Republicans rather than read about malaria in Africa? What if coverage of public health is chronically underfunded in the newsroom and then a pandemic comes along? Is there going to be a good reporter to cover that story? “If it bleeds, it leads” is a common term of art for the kind of news Americans like. Would coverage just devolve into that?

These are interesting questions, but I suspect that there is a market for lots of low-and high-brow subject matter; and rather than allocating scarce revenue across the press pool based on management fiat, the market might do a better job, to the broad benefit of all. This seems to especially be the case with national outlets. The Wall Street Journal can cover SPAC IPOs in great depth and across America there are enough people interested in that story to pay for it. The New York Times already has built a successful business by shifting from being the newspaper of record to the standard-bearer for the American Left. It’s already providing customer-tailored content in a broad sense. It just isn’t going all the way to giving customers full power to discriminate.

How might a variable pricing scheme work in practice?

- Cameron Parker