You're assuming that people care about the output of 20 writers though. Probably they don't. You need dozens or hundreds of substitutable writers under a singl

You're assuming that people care about the output of 20 writers though. Probably they don't. You need dozens or hundreds of substitutable writers under a single roof if you're reporting factual updates about a concrete situation as quickly as possible. Natural disasters, elections, sports, law changes, etc. Substack is for analysis and commentary. Traditional newspapers also bundle a handful of "superstar" writers along with their news, but many of those writers aren't very good and especially in the past 8 years many of the better ones have been purged because the best analysis requires free thinking, but free thinking is incompatible with a hard left takeover of an institution. It's no coincidence that Substack's top earning writers like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander have all been purged from other media outlets for their un-woke writing: there is demand for such analysis but newspapers are trying to extinguish it. In Taibbi's case he was pushed out of the media outlet he himself founded! Substack is now monetizing this demand, apparently, very successfully (the deals they cut with those writers have supposedly all been very profitable for Substack).