AMA with Substack and Matt Taibbi about a new business model for journalism

180 points

8 years ago

We’re Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, the founders of Substack (YC W18), and Matt Taibbi, a journalist and author who has written four best-sellers and is a contributing editor to the Rolling Stone. Substack is a tool that makes it simple for a writer to start a paid newsletter – but we’re also experimenting with other models for online publishing. For instance, Matt is using Substack to serialize a novel called The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing: Adventures of the Unidentified Black Male, which you can see here: https://taibbi.substack.com.

Matt has so far published six chapters in the book. The serial is an experiment for him, too, but even when it’s done he intends to keep publishing his independent work through Substack. We thought it might be interesting to bring Matt into a Hacker News discussion about this model, other things that might be tried, and the state of online publishing generally.

Last time Substack was involved in a discussion here on HN, we got a ton of great feedback (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16326411). We’d love to hear your thoughts about online publishing and how tech can (or cannot) help journalism!

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