8 ms·

What I don't get in these conversations is why no one mentions the role of the editorial team? Expecting even a great journalist to write consistently interest

What I don't get in these conversations is why no one mentions the role of the editorial team? Expecting even a great journalist to write consistently interesting and clear pieces on their own is like letting a musician record without a producer. It might be good for a while but the chances are a great producer is going to even out the output and make a tremendous difference in depth, quality and accessibility. To say nothing of checking the wilder excesses. These discussions which focus on the stars ignore the team so necessary for consistent and readable articles. I suppose the lone genius idea has an inexorable fascination.

gebruikersnaam 5y ago
In addition to this: traditional media organizations provide a training space for new writers, journalists etc. You can argue that that strengthens the status quo, but Substack provides nothing to promote new talent.
dcolkitt 5y ago
Isn’t escaping editorial teams exactly the reason that many migrated to Substack? A big reason people are on the platform is because they want to read Glenn Greenwald or Andrew Sullivan or Matt Yglesias in a way that’s not filtered by their previous editorial teams.
- bloke_zero 5y ago
  I take the point for sure, and escaping constraints can be valuable - but we must all be familiar with the 'great wo/man' syndrome where everything they say is right and doesn't need editing or even questioning...
blackshaw 5y ago
Many of the top-paid Substack writers do use part of their revenue to pay an editor.
- iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
  Surely Scott Alexander is not because lord of mercy is he verbose.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    If you're reading an article with a title "Much more than you ever wanted to know about..." then you can't claim you haven't been warned. For people that can't deal with it there's always twitter (and insane people that publish a full-size article as a thread of 285 tweets, God bless thread aggregators).
    - iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
      What about all the other articles, which are not titled "Much more than..."? What about the individual paragraphs, with their unendurable periphrasis and opacity?
      - blackshaw 5y ago
        If the writing style bothers you that much then why do you read it?
gambler 5y ago
Most people don't understand what editors do. Or what they used to do. These days editors in major publications seem to be preoccupied mostly with ideology enforcement. But when editors do their job properly, they are part quality control, part coordinators, part peer review. The notion that all of that is just a waste of time is quite misguided, since it's the lack of those exact things that caused modern corporate media to go to shit. But in the short tem fleeing traditional publications to something like Substack does make sense right now, precisely because editors of traditional publications became parasitic.
- iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
  > These days editors in major publications seem to be preoccupied mostly with ideology enforcement. > ... precisely because editors of traditional publications became parasitic Could you provide some evidence about what you mean? In these two sentences, you seem to be implying that there's some observable trend where editors have gone from: 1a. Not enforcing the political stance of their paper and 2a. Being indispensable to the writing process to: 1b. Enforcing the political stance of their paper and 2b. Becoming adversarial to the writing process This is very interesting. Could you provide some examples?
  - gambler 5y ago
    https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int... https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter And not directly related, but relevant overall: https://odysee.com/@AlisonMorrow:6/death-of-journalism-by-moral:c https://odysee.com/@AlisonMorrow:6/death-of-journalism-by-mo...
    - iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
      Thank you for taking the time to provide links! I read through the Weiss article, and I'd already read the Greenwald one. However I don't believe either can credibly used to point to any kind of historical trend. The Weiss article isn't even about any local editorial change: the paper found someone to provide a contrarian voice; that contrarian met frequent disagreement with the editors; that contrarian resigned--regression to the mean. The case of the Greenwald and Reality Winner is much worse. But at the end, it's just a case of an editorial board taking control of story, nothing historically unprecedented. I've been politically conscious since 1996 or so, and I don't think I can ever recall a single time where editorial boards didn't work to push through the position of their publication. I think I became acutely aware of "position" in 2003, with "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and Fox news, etc. But using the media to hype up war on false pretenses is a venerable tradition in the history of journalism, which, at least in the US, is a business and a political enterprise. Everything I've described in the last paragraph is socially harmful, and I think it's very important to have underground media and alt media as a counterweight to the mainstream. But there is also a strong need for professional, organized journalism, and I'm sure it still exists in at least some pages the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, etc, and even local Tribunes throughout the country. I don't think the proportion of quality fact checkers and editors has somehow degraded in the last x* years. The only things that I think have changed are the _widely-held perception_ that journalism is somehow terrible now, and the explosion of news being distributed in social media. The first is just standard tongue-clucking about the decline of democratic society; the second is about information being distributed at a totally new velocity and availability. I have no idea how the future will deal with that, the effect is only just beginning. * I'm not sure over what time period your proposed decline is supposed to have taken place.

gebruikersnaam 5y ago

In addition to this: traditional media organizations provide a training space for new writers, journalists etc. You can argue that that strengthens the status quo, but Substack provides nothing to promote new talent.

dcolkitt 5y ago

Isn’t escaping editorial teams exactly the reason that many migrated to Substack? A big reason people are on the platform is because they want to read Glenn Greenwald or Andrew Sullivan or Matt Yglesias in a way that’s not filtered by their previous editorial teams.

bloke_zero 5y ago
I take the point for sure, and escaping constraints can be valuable - but we must all be familiar with the 'great wo/man' syndrome where everything they say is right and doesn't need editing or even questioning...

blackshaw 5y ago

Many of the top-paid Substack writers do use part of their revenue to pay an editor.

iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
Surely Scott Alexander is not because lord of mercy is he verbose.
- smsm42 5y ago
  If you're reading an article with a title "Much more than you ever wanted to know about..." then you can't claim you haven't been warned. For people that can't deal with it there's always twitter (and insane people that publish a full-size article as a thread of 285 tweets, God bless thread aggregators).
  - iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
    What about all the other articles, which are not titled "Much more than..."? What about the individual paragraphs, with their unendurable periphrasis and opacity?
    - blackshaw 5y ago
      If the writing style bothers you that much then why do you read it?

gambler 5y ago

Most people don't understand what editors do. Or what they used to do. These days editors in major publications seem to be preoccupied mostly with ideology enforcement. But when editors do their job properly, they are part quality control, part coordinators, part peer review. The notion that all of that is just a waste of time is quite misguided, since it's the lack of those exact things that caused modern corporate media to go to shit. But in the short tem fleeing traditional publications to something like Substack does make sense right now, precisely because editors of traditional publications became parasitic.

iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
> These days editors in major publications seem to be preoccupied mostly with ideology enforcement. > ... precisely because editors of traditional publications became parasitic Could you provide some evidence about what you mean? In these two sentences, you seem to be implying that there's some observable trend where editors have gone from: 1a. Not enforcing the political stance of their paper and 2a. Being indispensable to the writing process to: 1b. Enforcing the political stance of their paper and 2b. Becoming adversarial to the writing process This is very interesting. Could you provide some examples?
- gambler 5y ago
  https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int... https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter And not directly related, but relevant overall: https://odysee.com/@AlisonMorrow:6/death-of-journalism-by-moral:c https://odysee.com/@AlisonMorrow:6/death-of-journalism-by-mo...
  - iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
    Thank you for taking the time to provide links! I read through the Weiss article, and I'd already read the Greenwald one. However I don't believe either can credibly used to point to any kind of historical trend. The Weiss article isn't even about any local editorial change: the paper found someone to provide a contrarian voice; that contrarian met frequent disagreement with the editors; that contrarian resigned--regression to the mean. The case of the Greenwald and Reality Winner is much worse. But at the end, it's just a case of an editorial board taking control of story, nothing historically unprecedented. I've been politically conscious since 1996 or so, and I don't think I can ever recall a single time where editorial boards didn't work to push through the position of their publication. I think I became acutely aware of "position" in 2003, with "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and Fox news, etc. But using the media to hype up war on false pretenses is a venerable tradition in the history of journalism, which, at least in the US, is a business and a political enterprise. Everything I've described in the last paragraph is socially harmful, and I think it's very important to have underground media and alt media as a counterweight to the mainstream. But there is also a strong need for professional, organized journalism, and I'm sure it still exists in at least some pages the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, etc, and even local Tribunes throughout the country. I don't think the proportion of quality fact checkers and editors has somehow degraded in the last x* years. The only things that I think have changed are the _widely-held perception_ that journalism is somehow terrible now, and the explosion of news being distributed in social media. The first is just standard tongue-clucking about the decline of democratic society; the second is about information being distributed at a totally new velocity and availability. I have no idea how the future will deal with that, the effect is only just beginning. * I'm not sure over what time period your proposed decline is supposed to have taken place.