On Becoming A Substack Man
A career choice fraught with peril and connotations but ultimately the right one for many writers in the current climate.
A few days ago I took a decision to end a four year relationship with Dexerto and move away from a role as a Contributing Editor. Despite the esports industry being an absolute blood bath right now – we exist in some sort of turbo-charged market correction that far exceeds the natural shrinkage of a recession – it was my decision and completely amicable. I loved my time there but I figure it’s time to roll the dice, maybe for the last time, and try something new.
It’s a recurring piece of advice I give younger, aspiring journalists. They ask how they should start. I tell them the same thing every day. Choose a beat, embed yourself in it, learn as much as you can over a period of months and then, when you’re oriented, start writing. Over time if you do good work, you’ll build credibility and when that happens someone, somewhere is going to hire you. There are no excuses to shirk this these days. You can create a blog, a broadcasting platform, a video archive and a community hub in about one hour. It wasn’t like that when I started.
That is all well and good at the start of course but what about in the middle or at the end? What about after 20 years? Flying solo can give off the impression you’re a busted asset, unemployable and maybe unhinged. Even these days people try and avoid it all costs, often taking derisory salaries and building up media companies that sell for millions or go bankrupt while you’re sleeping without even a courtesy email. Journalism is a mad business filled with almost only mad choices and I’ve always maintained you cannot be well-adjusted and do this job in the right way.
After a few conversations about potential jobs, both in and outside of esports, I figured I’d try truly going solo for the first time in my career. It is impossible to gauge whether this represents a good idea, career suicide, a slow drift into irrelevancy or a fast track to a new career peak. Having been the guy whose work has for years metaphorically told a predominantly teenage audience that Santa Claus isn’t real you can imagine how much of the vocal support is droned out by vitriolic hatred. Every time I published something 50% of the response debates the content of the work, the other 50% is a referendum on me as a human being, typically based on a deluge of lies, half truths and a handful of genuinely regretful behavioural transgressions and choices. How does one gauge the value of one’s voice in that environment? The answer is there’s only way to find out.
There’s a broader conversation happening in media about Substack that was also a consideration. The American journalists that work for legacy media companies went through the now standard process of attacking any platform that they don’t have an inordinate amount of influence over. These attacks ranged from the usual mockery of any form of self publication (even in the current digital landscape where it’s never made more sense to go this route it is called “vanity publishing.”) up to the more recent “misinformation is dangerous but only when our political enemies are peddling it” modus operandi. NBC’s Ben Collins, a journalist who recently made multiple erroneous public comments about a mass shooting and the killer’s motivations, even recently went so far as to coin the term “Substack Man” as a pejorative.
Among the American media cocktail set the line “Subscribe to my Substack” has become a pithy joke sign-off in the same way “thanks for coming to my TED Talk” is used. If you’re interested you can see these co-ordinated efforts in my video about it.
At the other end of the spectrum Substack has given many fine reporters a new type of freedom and reach, away from the constraints of the corporate media newsroom and without concern for artificial suppression from social media platforms. Glenn Greenwald in his departure from The Intercept might be an immediate example you think of but the best example would be the rise of Bari Weiss. After experiencing bullying from her colleagues at the New York Times, Weiss resigned in a very public fashion pointing out that “intellectual curiosity” and “risk taking” were now liabilities for journalists working at the Times. That was in 2020. A year later, according to Marketwatch, her Substack and podcast subscribers are earning her an annual amount of $800,000 and the doing so covering the types of stories the mainstream media choose to avoid. She then used that money to create “The Free Press” an online publication that has gone on to feature regular contributions from another dozen notable writers.
It represents a huge paradigm shift especially in a time when the subscription model for legacy projects like CNN+ failed so miserably.
Of course my beat keeps me mostly away from those types as I mostly write about something that is, in the grand scheme of things, comparatively unimportant. Perhaps it is for that reason that the current digital media landscape in esports and gaming is becoming a desolate wasteland. Verticals are folding left and right and the layoffs are brutally abrupt. The combination of low freelance rates and lack of employment opportunities mean that even tenured writers are now deciding to move in to other fields. Substack at least offers you a chance to become a master of your own destiny and answer the question about whether your work actually creates value to the people who consume it. I’ve been inspired by seeing the rise of my colleague Jacob Wolf, formerly of ESPN, whose Substack has been responsible for publishing some huge stories and his media company Overcome has already produced podcasts with some of the industry’s biggest figures.
I am of course sympathetic to the issues facing the publications themselves at this time. I spent four years at Dexerto and while they had a robust publication process that could delay stories from time to time I think in that entire time they never refused to publish a single story I covered. That has to be unprecedented when so many other websites rely upon the type of access that is routinely denied to the outlets publishing inconvenient truths. Undoubtedly Dexerto’s association with me came at a cost to them and yet outside of a few jokes about or some suggestions about how I could be a tad more diplomatic they held the line and never complained about doing so.
But if you’ve read Dexerto, who are one of the most successful media companies in the space, then you know what their needs are. They need either quick hits about social media happenings that are in the process of going viral or they need quick, regular brand new stories so that the publication becomes the primary source on a story. You can make an argument that an opinion piece from a notable figure carries some value but in reality this is a small part of the pie chart in the modern media landscape. Too many modern esports publications do not understand this. They hire 20 staff writers on salaries they cannot justify to re-write stories broken elsewhere because the editors instructing them to do this labour under the delusion that their publication can become the “go to” place for everyone. We’re far too fractured landscape for that and what is the point of re-writing another story if you’ve got nothing new to add to it?
The type of long form journalism I was producing was taking weeks of time to produce one feature length article with a word count that may as well be a “no entry” sign to the type of consumer who gets their news from TikTok. I never saw the viewing numbers but I know for sure that me writing a breakdown of all a whistleblower’s claims turned out to be a cover for his own blackmail enterprises will be blown the fuck out by a single post about Andrew Tate’s pizza box. Naturally, especially in this climate, I don’t want to draw a salary I cannot justify just because I can command it and equally I don’t want to put a publication that employs many other writers in jeopardy by being little more than a glorified columnist.
And so I’m here now, a Substack Man, with all of the benefits and risks that entails. I’m also fucking old, The Undertaker of esports journalism with an unbroken streak of accuracy going back almost nineteen years that everyone, for some reason, wants to fail so they can say I was a lying piece of shit all along. I’m now my own editorial oversight but I also lack the standard and shield of a masthead. It’s the frontier, it’s the proud highway, it’s a test and an adventure. It’s nerve-wracking, it’s exciting and probably something I should have done sooner.
In terms of how this affects you my faithful readers, very little will change. I’m much the same person I was when I started doing this and the types of story I am going to pursue remain unaltered. I’ll never paywall an important public-interest story and nor will I ever charge for the archive. You might pay for the sauce but the steak will always be free. That seems a reasonable compromise so we can make this thing work and honestly I hope it does. I felt more energised in the last two days than I had in some time and for that I owe you all a great deal of thanks. The scary part of a trust exercise is being worried no-one’s going to catch you when you fall backwards. I know that trust goes both ways.
As long as what you write about is true and is imbued with passion, it is not unimportant. World news is unimportant as it takes a magnifying glass on the worst parts of society and makes the average person think it is normal, spreading fear, anxiety, and stress. When you write passionately about a pass time, that passion inspires regardless of whether it is a "silly game". Ethics, passion, and gratitude transcend subject matter. The gamma hives that attack you are because your honesty and moral rigidity shines a light on the emptiness and moral depravity of their inner worlds. I am grateful for the years of content and the insane amount of your life you put into the game we love. Cheers and God bless
I enjoy reading and re-reading your works. Partially because of the language, as It's not in my mother tongue and it has subtlety that seems unattainable to me. Partially because I find you and your world views to be interesting and enlightening.
Sorry, I'll subscribe as soon as I find a job. Our department closed off and I'm too anxious to search for something new, but it shouldn't take me much longer until I get into another call center.