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Sovereign writers and Substack

• jger15 6y ago
  "...it’s not that Substack will compete with existing publications for their best writers, but rather that Substack makes it easy for the best writers to discover their actual market value." Thompson on point per usual
  • mc32 6y ago
    And that raises a question. What will readers value? Will they value rigorous writers who may provide discomfort or engaging writers who write to choirs?
    • WJW 6y ago
      Presumably different audiences will prefer different writers, as they always have.
      • mc32 6y ago
        Yes but like food diet, is junk food more profitable or are staples more profitable? What should we aim for? If junk is more profitable, is that okay? Do we all jump on that wagon while the going is good, or do we think a minute about what is more fulfilling?
        • WJW 6y ago
          There is no "we" here, certainly not in the sense that "do we think a minute". People can choose for themselves just fine, and they'll do so whether I wring my hands about it or not. If you want to be worried about other people, go ahead but leave me out of it. :)
        • jeffreyrogers 6y ago
          Obviously trash sells and it always has ("The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience"), but some people care more about things like truth and style than they do about money.
          • madmadjo 6y ago
            This is the world we're living in. Unfortunately, I can give you only one upvote...
        • pessimizer 6y ago
          Media outlets other than substack are also hiring terrible people, and optimizing for trash. To me the largest difference between large corporate outlets and substack (and other reader-financed journalists) is that large corporate outlets will keep people employed for years that nobody wants to read and could never support themselves independently - journalists who are only important and interesting because of their access to the outlet. The outlets themselves keep those journalists around as pure vehicles for the opinions of their owners. At least with these outlets, the owners are the readers. If the readers like trash, they'll pay for trash. If the owners like quality, they'll demand it. I don't have to worry about how the subject of the article will affect Bezos's net worth, or wonder how David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, or Thomas Friedman are still employed.
          • mc32 6y ago
            But still, we’re not sure that the content will be free of external influence taking advantage of the writer’s reputation. Obviously if they peddle too many interested articles they'll likely get caught, but if they do it once in a while or take payment from opposing interests, etc., who’ll know the difference?
        • jdsully 6y ago
          Regardless of whether Doritos are more profitable we still have millions of acres of staple crops grown each year. There is no shortage of good writing but it may not come in microwaveable packets. If the majority of the people don't care then that's the downside to living in a free society where each has their choice.
        • tomaskafka 6y ago
          Majority people's staples are now junk. I expect the same thing to happen in media.
      • jameshart 6y ago
        One of the dangers is that it turns out audiences actually prefer writers constrained and filtered and checked by editors. But by the time they realize that, editors won’t exist any more.
        • soneca 6y ago
          Very unlikely that they won’t exist anymore. And whichever low number they are reduced to, they will start to grow again because there will be people willing to pay for their services.
        • Meekro 6y ago
          I'd like my journalists to be constrained by the truth, and paid editors in the context of a "traditional" newspaper are one possible way to achieve that. However, if you believe the stats on this, trust for traditional news sources is at record lows. I personally don't trust traditional news sources very much. Therefore, I'm open to trying something different. I've been a happy subscriber to a handful of Substack journalists for a few months now. It's too soon to say whether this will be a lasting improvement, but it's hard to do worse than the mainstream media.
          • jimkleiber 6y ago
            I'm curious, as I tend to trust many of the large media outlets, especially the NYT and WaPo. 1) Which outlets do you consider to be the "mainstream media" or "traditional media"? And 2) why don't you trust them?
            • Meekro 6y ago
              Rather than annoy the HN mods by derailing this conversation into politics, I can answer in detail to you directly. If you want that, could you update your bio on HN to include your email address?
              • jimkleiber 6y ago
                I appreciate that both for helping me keep it non-politics on HN and also for being willing to reach out. I've updated my email in my bio, hope to hear from you soon.
    • jiriknesl 6y ago
      It depends on the reader. I, for example, always value, when I learn something new. No matter if it supports or questions my current views. The issue with some Substack authors is they fall into Productivity Bullshit Industrial Complex (https://99u.adobe.com/articles/55974/the-creative-worlds-bullshit-industrial-complex https://99u.adobe.com/articles/55974/the-creative-worlds-bul...) cathegory which is not very novel for anyone, who have read a few pieces in this space.
  • purple_ferret 6y ago
    IMO it should read more: "...it’s not that Substack will compete with existing publications for their *popular* writers, but rather that Substack makes it easy for the *popular* writers to discover their actual market value." I've yet to read what I would consider high quality journalism on Substack. It's a lot of quick take opinion pieces. On top of that, some may consider journalistic good writing a collective effort, in which an editor is usually necessary.
    • coldtea 6y ago
      >I've yet to read what I would consider high quality journalism on Substack. It's a lot of quick take opinion pieces. Most of what passes for "high quality journalism" in "high quality outlets" are fluff pieces and government/corporate PR masquerading as facts. And as Alan Kay said: "a point of view is worth 80 IQ points". I'd rather read the opinion of people with well honed points of view than what passes as news in mainstream media.
      • glennismyfren 6y ago
        Glenn Greenwald has written a number of very good pieces on his Substack that I would in no way describe as quick take opinion pieces and Matt Taibbi has the best reporting on the journalism industry itself going around. These guys are "well honed" because they're well read on the activities of the media and they think and communicate clearly Maybe you're not reading the right posts or you just agree with the prevailing narrative in the traditional outlets? Usually I find the people who don't see value in Substack also want the news to be reported with "moral clarity" and to eschew objectivity as a valuable aim entirely. And besides, the mainstream outlets are barely reporting on anything anyway (where's the national news coverage of the George Floyd Autonomous Zone in Minneapolis? For the second time an American city has lost sovereignty over several blocks and the mainstream media is ignoring it) and if you do real investigative journalism into the wrong group, like Andy Ngo has (thank God for Quillette) you are branded a fascist
        • purple_ferret 6y ago
  • gnicholas 6y ago
    Reminds me of a quote from an economics professor, whose high salary was questioned by someone from another discipline. "The university doesn't determine my salary; the market does that. The university only decides the city in which I earn it." /paraphrase
    • wmf 6y ago
      But the market was invented by economics professors...
      • prepend 6y ago
        Discovered maybe, but certainly not invented.
        • over_bridge 6y ago
          Don't even pretend that the market is some sort of natural phenomenon. That's got human fingerprints all over it
          • geomark 6y ago
            Humans aren't a natural phenomenon?
          • solveit 6y ago
            Could you define "market" because I don't think you're using the word the way I would use it.
          • prepend 6y ago
            Markets exist in nature with the whole “seeking equilibrium” of so many natural systems (eg, chemical reactions).
          • jiriknesl 6y ago
            Of course, market is natural phenomenon. Every process with pressure, suction and or differences of potential is trying to achieve equilibrium. Electricity, hydraulics, they all manifest the same principles. Except that in nature, it's driven by pure physics. With people, you need to understand value and it's more generic. One step more generic from physics, is cybernetics. And market is a cybernetic system with difference of energies trying to achieve equilibrium.
• ceilingcorner 6y ago
  Of course things aren’t so simple; Sullivan, like several of the other names on that leaderboard, are, to put it gently, controversial. That he along with other lightning-rod writers ended up on Substack is more a matter of where else would they go? While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism as a whole. It often will just mean that successful writers are the most celebrity-like ones: writing controversial things because it gets more traffic and therefore more income. I don't know about you, but I don't want the tactics of Kim Kardashian to be the model of a future journalist.
  • slibhb 6y ago
    > writing controversial things because it gets more traffic and therefore more income. This is a danger but I'd rather have "controversial" than "if you deviate from the politics of the publication that pays your salary, you get fired". Personally, I like Sullivan, Greenwald, Yglesias, Taibbi, etc. I think Sullivan and Yglesias are not drama queens and that Geenwald and Tiabbi are. But I like all 4, I just think the latter two need a responsible editor to rein them in a bit.
    • ceilingcorner 6y ago
      I don't dislike them, I just dislike the idea that becoming a successful journalist will now mean you must also be charismatic, good at attracting attention to yourself, etc.
      • inglor_cz 6y ago
        To be honest, writing is a kind of art and what you describe has always been important among artistically gifted people. Introverted and shy geniuses tend to be discovered after their deaths, if ever.
        • ceilingcorner 6y ago
          No, that really isn't true at all. Some of the most famous writers and artists throughout history were terrible at self-promotion.
• zpeti 6y ago
  A very elegant non-political article getting to the core of the issue - that yet again old business models are being disrupted and this pisses people off. Shame these pissed off people have to get political though.
• analyte123 6y ago
  The writers aren't completely "sovereign" as long as they are using Stripe (and Visa and Mastercard) to process payments. It is basically inevitable that some entity in the payment system will eventually interfere with Substack even if Substack themselves hold the line.
  • ceilingcorner 6y ago
    This is kind of a use-case for Bitcoin, no?
    • capableweb 6y ago
      It's the planned/future use-case for Bitcoin, yes. As of now, you cannot pay a lot of your daily expenses with Bitcoin so you still need a way of going from Bitcoin to USD/EUR/$LOCAL_CURRENCY so instead of Visa and Mastercard being the gatekeepers, the centralized exchange facilitating the fiat-trade is now the gatekeeper instead.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • pydry 6y ago
        Not exactly future. It happened in 2014 when MasterCard and visa banned payments to wikileaks. Wikileaks continued to take Bitcoin.
  • redisman 6y ago
    I guess we're waiting to find out if Trump or someone will start writing there. The current big boys are all non-woke center left/right so they're not actually at all outrageous to the general public.
    • gfosco 6y ago
      They are however outrageous to the far-left journos at mainstream publications, which is why there's so much attention focused on Substack right now. Trump won't go anywhere that he doesn't get to own a significant portion of the business, so he'll have to build his own site (which it is already reported that he is doing.)
• danpalmer 6y ago
  I find the current criticism of Substack quite interesting. It seems to be on the assumption that they are a publisher, or at least a visible brand in the publishing process, and they do indeed appear to be in the middle unlike most companies. It's obvious that the NYT are responsible for what's published on their site, after all it says NYT across the top, NYT on the subscription fee, and they (theoretically) have editorial control. On the other hand it's obvious that Stripe (for example) are not responsible for what's published on Stratechery, they are invisible to the customer, and I think most reasonable people would not suggest that Stripe exercise moral judgement on Stratechery and decline the business unless Ben Thompson crossed a line that is very far from acceptable (likely bordering on illegality). But Substack is both. Their name is in the URL, writers are found via Substack, articles say "published on Substack" on them. They are trying to claim that they are just a backend and that it's up to writers what they publish, but they are in fact a frontend at least in part for the customer, and therefore any decision or lack thereof is taking a moral standpoint. I think Substack are going to have to decide whether they want to own that responsibility, and become known for a certain "type" of content, or whether they want to fade into the background and let the writers' brands take over.
  • ceilingcorner 6y ago
    They are just using the same playbook as the rest of Silicon Valley. Twitter and Facebook manage to never be considered a platform or a publisher, and they won't be until legislation requires it.
    • danpalmer 6y ago
      People view things like Substack as closer to traditional news publishing/writing and quite differently to social media so I think they're starting from a position of far higher expectations. But regardless, Twitter and Facebook are becoming more well known for their positions on these issues. Twitter is known for having a "lefty bubble" and taking a long time to "ban nazis". Facebook is known for having everyone's conspiracy theory loving Uncle.
  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
• michaelt 6y ago
  > [...] writers who can command a paying audience have heretofore been significantly underpaid. I don't know for sure, but I suspect the writer-paid-monthly model is straight up more effective at pulling money from readers' pockets than the magazine subscription model. I mean, I can pay £34 a year for a fortnightly magazine with quite a few writers doing quite a lot of investigative journalism, and even mailing a paper copy to me. I can pay £10 for a novel by a bestselling author who takes several years to write each novel. But with the market positioning of "$10 per month" it turns out you can sell one person's writing for £86 ($120) per year. Strange that the output of one full time human writer could be priced so differently, even when every example is award-winning and well known. Perhaps the future of writing is a return to Dickens-era serialisation, and the next J. K. Rowling will be posting two chapters a week on Patreon.
  • ghaff 6y ago
    How many people will actually pay $120/year though. I pay in that ballpark for the NYT and The Economist. But it seems borderline nuts to pay that for a single author's newsletter unless they're delivering unique insights that I can turn into a lot more money than that. Or maybe is they do a really good job of covering a niche hobby although that's still almost certainly more than a niche hobby magazine would charge.
  • abhinav22 6y ago
    I think once the novelty wears off and people start seeing how many subscriptions they are on, they will move to consolidated packages covering multiple writers, like Netflix for writing. Which already exists in the sense of Medium.com Everything reverts to the mean and your point is valid - we shouldn’t expect one form of writing to have abnormally high returns to effort ratio for too long, unless there is a general shift in the value of writing by the population at large. Which given current trends towards video and higher stimulation, I would assume is less likely? Unless one could argue there’s a huge untapped latent market of bookworms. I think there is some market to a degree as people get burned out on other forms of media, but I’m not sure if it’s large enough for substacks model to work for a significant period in the future
    • 6y ago
• abhinav22 6y ago
  Substack’s business model doesn’t make sense. They are just using VC money to try and build social platform, but it’s a flawed one at best: - MOST people will not want to pay for articles. Especially in an ever increasing world of subscription payments across tv, music, SaaS, I really don’t see how email newsletters will be high on people’s lists - for the quality writers that people do want to pay, they will eventually move off the platform if it makes sense to do so (ie they get their brand recognition and followers and then jump ship to their own website). For the smaller ones, patreon onlyfans or some other direct contribution model would make more sense IMO So I really don’t get Substack’s model and how it can be successful long term unless it truly becomes the landing page / YouTube of articles. Which I can’t imagine it will with all the competition More generally I’m looking forward to the day where the SaaS bubble bursts a bit or at least pricing consolidates - every Tom, Dick and Harry is taking a crud app and adding a few features and trying to create a b2c or b2b business It works to some degree, but I’m looking forward to the day that there are enough programming specialists that many solutions are done in house As to substack, it’s a very simple technology stack; really the play with it and all other vc funded startups is to spend big, grab marketplace / users and exit. Then the buyer needs to monetize or is left holding the bag I’m much more of a fan of the Medium model, and even there it’s very hard for writers and for the platform to make reasonable money. It’s interesting how substack is asking everyone to bring their own mailing list with them, it’s a very smart way to build out their users / network, I give them that.
  • bhupy 6y ago
    I guess my questions are: - Does it have to appeal to "MOST" people for it to be a viable dividends-paying business? - Does it have to be the "landing page / YouTube of articles" in order to be a viable dividends-paying business?
    • abhinav22 6y ago
      Both these questions are related in the sense it reflects how large the audience needs to be to a viable business. Question is how much VC money has been burnt on it - perhaps it’s bootstrapped well and it can succeed at a much smaller scale; it’s definitely possible. However in the long run, it’s somewhat of an easily replicable stack / feature set, particularly as I assume that most highly successful writers would want to control their branding and prefer not to be on substack if they could reach the same audience. Which they likely can’t. Substack’a SEO abilities will be key to its success as that is in many ways it’s main feature (everything else can be replicated by any one of the millions of web developers out there). In that sense, becoming the landing page of bookworms would be a significant achievement and to answer your question an important goal for any considerable success. I base this on the fact that it seems like they have spent a fair bit in building the platform and it’s not as bootstrapped / low in capital as it may need to be to be viable as a smaller entity. But I’m guessing very much here! Is it really that different to hosting blogs, personal websites or to Medium.com? They just have the mailing list feature, but for most that doesn’t work because it takes a long time to build your own mailing list, so the target audience of writers is small. My 2c
• pavlov 6y ago
  There seems to be a backlash in progress against Substack's publishing policies. Last week I finally subscribed on Substack to an art-related list where I had been enjoying the free edition for a while. ($55 / year felt like a pretty good deal for access to more of this interesting content.) A few days later, the writer announced that they're moving off Substack. I'll just quote their message verbatim: "I’m planning to switch to my newsletter provider from Substack to Ghost in the near future — if I understand it right, the paid subscriptions can all be migrated, so I don’t think it’ll be a big hiccup on the subscriber end. I’ll let you know when I actually make the switch. "It’s because I’m concerned with Substack’s marketing plan of subsidizing controversial authors (discourse here: Annaleen Newitz, Emily VanDerWerff, Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Metafilter thread), particularly a weirdly large number that can be reasonably construed as anti-trans. Plus, Graham Linehan still uses the service, despite being kicked off plenty of other platforms for documented anti-trans abuse. "The media profiting off of platforming anti-trans views was a major impetus behind the rise of anti-trans sentiment in the UK in 2016, and the same seems to be happening in the US (broadly, not just on Substack). Yet Substack’s response seems to pretty bluntly reject the idea that they need to reconsider anything. Even if they ban Linehan in the future, I’ve lost faith in the leadership." Personally I feel this author is doing the right thing by getting off a platform whose policies they can't support. And it makes me wonder about Substack's stickiness, because as a consumer I certainly don't care one bit which company processes my annual payment and delivers the emails.
  • Meekro 6y ago
    I definitely agree that authors and readers should seek out platforms that reflect their values. But to me, what you described is more fairly called a "reshuffling" rather than a "backlash." Some writers that have been canceled elsewhere are finding a home and an audience on Substack, and others are leaving because they can't, in good conscience, share a home with the first group. Both groups end up better off than they were before. I think Substack's lack of stickiness is part of its appeal. Writers are starting to see the downside of writing for someone else's platform, and Substack is a reaction to that. The writers on Substack own their content database, subscriber list, and even use their own Stripe account to process payments. This makes it easy for a writer to migrate, and makes it hard to deplatform people-- what's the point of getting someone banned from Substack if they'll just be back online in a day on Substack2 without having missed a beat?
• deleted 6y ago
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• tarkin2 6y ago
  Vaguely off topic, but why do so many programmers use substack and medium to write about programming? Why not use their own programming skills to create their own website, rather than consume a service? I used to love visiting programmers' websites, where programmer's would use their skills to not only write, but create. Now it's largely a drab stream of medium posts.
  • renewiltord 6y ago
    You can still go to programmers' sites where the software is written by the programmer as well as the content. The answer to your question is the same as the one to "Why do software engineers use libraries?"
  • organsnyder 6y ago
    Only so many hours in a day. Perhaps setting up and operating a blogging platform isn't how they'd prefer to use their time. When I ran my own business, I had the skills to do everything myself: accounting, order fulfillment, everything. I created a kick-ass system that saved me hours of work for things like calculating and disbursing royalty checks (it was a publishing business). Sure, it was better than off-the-shelf software, but I would have been able to dedicate a lot more time to the core of my business—the part where I was creating truly unique value—if I had hired an accountant, or at least used off-the-shelf software.
  • drcode 6y ago
    LOL I built my own blogging platform for my personal site, but I get constant nagging for not handling permalinks in the expected way and for never implementing RSS. (lisperati.com)
  • tarboreus 6y ago
    Network effects. Medium and Substack help discoverability. It's trivial to geta site online, but difficult to have people come across it.
    • pier25 6y ago
      I don't know about Substack, but when I wrote on Medium the vast majority of readers came from outside of Medium. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I had a popular article with something like 170k reads of which only 15% came from Medium itself.
• mdoms 6y ago
  Substack is what happens when the mainstream media elites overplay their hand and force heterodox writers out of the "mainstream". As it turns out there are still plenty of people who want to read this kind of writing, and we don't appreciate the gatekeeping from formerly reputable sources.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • hdhdbeupphw 6y ago
    The world already has enough clickbait and hot takes. Substack will probably make a lot of money, but it won’t increase the quality of journalism in the US. We need less opinion in our news diet not more.
    • b215826 6y ago
      > We need less opinion in our news diet not more. There still are such news sources -- The Economist, Reuters, AP, etc., rarely editorialize their articles. Most other mainstream news sources like NYT, WSJ, etc., are just as clickbaity and cater to a specific demographic of the society just like Substack writers do. So I don't see it as a loss for journalism if people stopped subscribing to, say The Guardian, and instead supported a Substack writer.
      • dionian 6y ago
        Sadly, what you say about Reuters and AP are simply not true. And I agree, less opinion is good, especially in the once-reputable legacy mainstream media like the paper of the record, the NYT, which pushed the trump-hater Michael Steele 'pee tape' rumor (and the idea that Trump did not explicitly condemn white supremacy ) amongst others.
        • aklemm 6y ago
          The NYT take on Trump not condemning white supremacy only improves my view of the paper. Trump talks out of both sides of his mouth in that scenario (and so many others) as a way to lay an evergreen trap for critics. I want my paper to take a broader view and then make a decision on best possible info; Trump never convincingly condemned white supremacy.
• autarch 6y ago
  As a further data point, Freddie deBoer just published a post with details about his Substack Pro deal - https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/financial-transparency https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/financial-transparency
• smoldesu 6y ago
  I don't think I'll ever end up using Substack. In a world where information is virtually worthless, why should I pay you for your opinion?
  • coldtea 6y ago
    It might be worthless to you. Depends on what you can take out of it, or do with it. Well formed opinions, ideas, curation, and coverage, and priceless to others. To some because they operate in fields where they can put to use such information, to others because they want to understand the world they live in better (even if they don't get something out of it). Even more so "in a world where information is virtually worthless", in other words, in a world where good stuff is lost in the noise / signal ratio. In any case, I'd rather pay for a few great newsletters than for wasting my time with the nth BS Netflix show. (I pay for a couple of Substack subscriptions)
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  • nonameiguess 6y ago
    A lot of these writers are operating on a freemium model, where you can consume nearly all of what they write for free, and subscribe if you want to for a few extra subscribers only articles. Only a tiny number are purely for subscribers.
• deleted 6y ago
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• cwkoss 6y ago
  I perceive a greatly increased volume of criticism of Glen Greenwald on my Twitter feed since he moved to Substack. Makes we wonder if all of the criticism is organic (i.e. readers didn't like how he covered Hunter Biden laptop controversy) or to what extent this criticism is being led by trad media journalists who feel threatened by him leaving the trad media business model.
  • circumvent123 6y ago
    False dichotomy? It could be that his opinions were appropriately constrained by an editor previously and now is showing worse opinions. (Note: I don't follow him... not super familiar, but this seems like a weird either/or)
    • cwkoss 6y ago
      I would classify that as "organic" criticism. To put another way: are people on twitter criticizing him because they don't like his articles, or because other people on twitter have said that you shouldn't like his articles?
• karaterobot 6y ago
  > First, Substack is going to have a serious problem retaining its most profitable writers unless it substantially reduces its 10% take. This is the part I'm having trouble understanding. 10% doesn't seem like a high percentage for a distributor, even if they're just hosting text and images. Of course Substack also provides comments, notifications, admin/moderation, and some degree of marketing and aggregation effects (not Aggregation in the strict Ben Thompson sense, just people going to a well-known website because they know there are things to read there). None of that is super hard to set up, but If I was Matthew Yglesias, and I was making $775k next year on Substack, how much incentive would I have to leave and pay someone to create and/or manage a new site for me? Even assuming there's no lock-in whatsoever from Substack, or that Substack does not increase its value proposition for content creators by then, it seems like I'd probably just stay where I was and collect my $700k, and be pretty thrilled about it. It's possible I'm wrong about that in some cases, but would it happen in so many cases that it poses an existential risk to Substack? Seems like a stretch!
  • Eridrus 6y ago
    Everyone likes easy cash. Adding 50k/yr at the click of a button seems pretty compelling, and consider that the mere existence of alternatives may force Substack to renegotiate contracts woth high profile writers. But even if you ignore this, it's still a nascent space, Substack has not captured all the writers out there, and I think the fee will definitely be part of the package that writers care about. Substack should try to provide more value, but if it can't, this seems like it will be a problem for them since there is little competitive moat here.
  • mbgerring 6y ago
    Successful writers stand to increase their revenue by the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars by ditching Substack for any number of easy-to-administer self-hosted solutions. Writers like Yglesias gain absolutely nothing from staying on Substack. The CMS interface can't possibly be worth the pay cut they're taking by staying there.
    • sfRattan 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
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• ddingus 6y ago
  I love substack. My trust in domestic mainstream media is at an all-time low. I am perfectly happy to read a diverse body of opinion, think for myself, and consider current events policy and many other matters on my own. I think you should too. Substack makes that possible.
• slim 6y ago
  Sovereign writers, particularly those focused on analysis and opinion, depend on journalists actually reporting the news this is not true anymore since long time. the news is increasingly broken by the source itself on social media
• ReadFList 6y ago
  How does anyone even take journalists seriously? I could understand that you follow a specific person you believe to be fair and intelligent, but most news orgs are just a bunch of liers and propagandists, just look at the wave of "fact-checkers", from any side of the political spectrum. When in doubt, a journalist is to be assumed to be a subversive lier until proven innocent. These are the people who have as greatest award for excellency in their profession, the Pulitzer award, named after a notorious lier (Spanish–American War) and one of the creators of "yellow journalism".