I keep waiting for someone at Substack to start an aggregate of a whole bunch of wankers (some of whom are good), with consistent editing, advertising, and publish dates. Sell it at one reasonable price.
They could call it, I don't know... A "magazine" [tm]
I've thought the same about both Substack and legacy media.
I recently cancelled my NYT subscription, but I would happily pay a one-time fee for a nicely packaged, printed copy of their journalistic scoops. I think their last big one was about the impact of drone bombings in civilian areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's an important piece of research that deserves a permanent home.
No such option exists. And unfortunately, I'm not going to pay $20/mo CAD for what appears to be 50% opinion columnists, often writing columns about the same thing week after week.
Yeah. Very, very few writers are compelling every single week. But take a group of 40, and it's almost guaranteed that at least one hits it out of the park in any given week.
There are curated magazine-like things on Substack, but they are organized by writers' collectives, not Substack itself. One example: https://www.discourseblog.com/about
I keep waiting for someone at Substack to start an aggregate of a whole bunch of wankers (some of whom are good), with consistent editing, advertising, and publish dates. Sell it at one reasonable price.
They could call it, I don't know... A "magazine" [tm]