Users will be able to edit and publish newsletters to their followers-of which some writers have hundreds of thousands on Twitter-in a closed system. Though the relaunch date for Revue remains uncertain, Twitter has begun to integrate the newsletter editor into the main social media platform. A few days prior to the Facebook development, Twitter purchased Revue, a web newsletter service based in the Netherlands. Sources told the paper it would allow writers to build followings on their Facebook pages, curate email lists, and provide subscription features to help authors monetize their work-a very similar model to Substack. In January, The New York Times reported on Facebook’s plan to develop web tools for journalists and writers. Twitter boasts 192 million users, Facebook boasts 2.8 billion users those are massive built-in audiences for centralized newsletter distribution. But Substack is a small company, employing 20 people, destined to compete with the social media giants.
This makes Substack a tempting destination for nonconformists who rile progressives on other platforms, such as Twitter. In its commercial expansion, Substack lives and dies by its self-consciousness about the intellectual diversity available to its readers and its explicit reluctance to censor its writers. Substack has raised more than $17 million in venture capital and signed several high-profile journalists to high-dollar contracts in order to further popularize the platform, which nets its most successful writers hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. But the business has been buzzing for the past year or so, with Silicon Valley company Substack leading the most successful-and controversial-enterprise. Newsletters may seem somewhat niche, not worth the attention of multibillion dollar corporations. But now-despite their better judgment-they’re getting into the web newsletter business. Facebook and Twitter spent the past few years swearing (before Congress!) that they’re platforms, not publishers they don’t want to micromanage political speech. These tech companies helped turn reporters into personalities, and they’ve empowered those personalities to challenge those institutions both internally (as employees who command audiences beyond the employer’s own pages) and externally (as independent writers who now compete with full-staff publications for paid subscriptions). The latter corralled journalists, activists, and consumers onto a raucous liveblogging platform which has, for better or worse, laid bare the biases, processes, and pressures which drive so much editorial judgment at media institutions beholden to the favor of an algorithm. The former wrecked the old business model for newsroom journalism and stoked global panic about political misinformation in the process.
#Best substack newsletters series
For more than a decade, Facebook and Twitter have hosted a series of revolutions in mass media.
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