Why I Hate Substack

What is lost when we lose our editors?

Nic McPhee, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Earlier this week, the online magazine Current announced it will be shuttering in April. A small magazine run by a dedicated team of editors volunteering their time, Current was a lovely diamond in a whole mess of internet rough. I was only able to publish a few short pieces there since discovering it, but many of my favorite writers have appeared in its digital pages, and the outpouring of support it has received since the announcement makes me confident that it will be sorely missed.

The economics of online publishing without ugly advertisements dominating the page are dismal, and the magazine’s announcement indicates that financial support through subscriptions was declining, even as “the number of clicks on the site has remained steady.” As Paul Pastor writes on twitter, this is “another evidence that the public today prefers to pay to read *people* rather than *publications*, a significant shift that explains a fair slice of present media dynamics, and which any institution would do well to ponder.”

I think Paul is right, and I want to reflect a little on what’s lost when publishing institutions close. Paul spoke to broader media dynamics, but I’m specifically interested in what’s lost for writers as writers.

Though I am as grumpy as anyone else about how bad things are generally, it’s not obviously the case that people don’t want to read good writing anymore. It’s just that people’s reading habits have shifted. Instead of subscribing to glossy, hard copy magazines with mastheads, many editors, systems of pitching and review etc., or to their digital counterparts, people are subscribing to individual writers whose “newsletters” have become more like full publications. Substack is the most prominent example of this, with a recent redesign that allows people’s Substack “home” pages to more closely resemble traditional online publications.

But Substack isn’t alone in trying to cash in on the large number of individual writers. Elon Musk has also thrown his hat into the ring, allowing certain prominent twitter accounts to publish lengthy pieces of writing on a subscription model as well. Isn’t this good? Isn’t this a democratization of publishing, allowing anyone with good things to say to be heard and to build an audience? Well, maybe. But that’s not the point (or at least not what I want to talk about).

I’m not particularly interested in the arguments about freedom, gatekeeping, accessibility etc. What I am interested in is the question of how good writers are and can be cultivated in this new environment. Now, I’m not going to claim myself to be a “good writer,” and obviously I’m engaging in this new democratic publishing mechanism myself. But I do want to speak a little bit to the process I’ve gone through as an always-developing writer that I think allowed me to even be confident enough to publish my own work on a “blog” for you all to read.

I began writing for broader publication in the middle of my undergraduate education, as a junior or a senior as I recall. Having worked as a writer for an on-campus publication focused on international affairs, I started having ideas that felt like they would make interesting essays that resembled the things I enjoyed reading. So, I wrote them up and began sending these essays to editors hoping that they would agree that I had something worthwhile to say.

The early results were disappointing, to say the least. I learned that I had serious problems with not actually saying what I meant, or with being unclear in my argument, substituting flowery language for clarity, and so on. After several frustrations, I successfully published a few pieces with another now-shuttered outlet called Humane Pursuits. HP editors, many of whom are now wildly successful writers elsewhere, were gentle and kind but thorough and tough. I received rejections, yes, and also drafts of pieces returned in what seemed like a bloody flood of red “ink.” I began to see what an editor could do to shape a writer’s voice, and how I could learn to improve my writing so that editors didn’t feel the need to shape my voice as strongly. I learned structure and style and slowly became more satisfied with myself and my writing (unwarrantedly so, as I now re-read those pieces and cringe a bit at what I thought was “good”).

Expanding outside of HP helped me learn that not all outlets and their editors are the same. Where publishing at the Intercollegiate Review, for example, was a rigorous intellectual exercise, a process and a conversation with a meticulous editor who constantly pushed me to clarify my ideas before he would let my words touch his pages, publishing at another outlet (which shall go nameless) was mostly an exercise in ego-stroking. Once my foot was in the door at Unnamed Outlet, they effectively accepted anything I sent them with nary a correction to be found. Prior to writing for Substack, this was the closest I came to just self-publishing whatever I thought was interesting.

The contrast between these two editorial approaches could not have been starker. Importantly, my writing for HP and IR honed me, put me into a kind of tutelage to an editor whose experienced eye for style and content was far sharper than my own. While I published at least a couple things I consider decent at Unnamed Outlet, I have no doubt that they could have been improved with editorial oversight and guidance.

Fast forward to today, and here I am writing for a Substack blog, so perhaps I’m being hypocritical. But I don’t believe I ever would have published the variety of pieces I have in the variety of outlets I have if I had first or primarily pursued writing as primarily a journey of self-publishing. I learned valuable things about how to communicate good ideas beautifully and effectively from all of the editors I have had over the years, things that I cannot and do not learn by sending an email out into the ether, with troves of typos and ambiguities abounding.

Of course, I don’t intend to shutter my Substack, because I’ve found it quite fun, and quite useful at motivating me to make writing a habit. But the greatest improvement in my writing happens when I send my writing to the scrutinizing eye of a magazine editor, someone whose time and resources are limited, and so can only afford to publish work of a certain quality. With their guidance, I improve my writing both in the short term, in the sense of making a piece better than it would have been without their help, and in the long term, in the sense of making everything I write in the future just a little bit better. Frankly, I’m not sure anything resembling that process happens when I’m writing for Substack.

As Current has written on their twitter, so much of their work at the magazine was done to “resist the Substack culture.” I take this to mean the culture where writers develop a “following” and a fandom as lone wolves, perhaps at worst descending into the depths of audience captured silliness, never beholden to anyone but themselves and their audience’s attention span. While this may have benefits (of which I am a beneficiary), it is no clean substitute for the often thankless work of editorial education. There is, as

Hadden Turner

has written, “nothing like having your essays edited and refined by an experienced editor.”

So, while I am glad that you’re here, and I hope that you support the writers you enjoy on Substack and elsewhere, please do also take the time to subscribe to “magazines,” either print or digital, that ensure that good writers can continue to find educative outlets to grow in their craft. We writers and readers lose these at our own peril.