Substack vs. blogging
Everyone has a Substack these days. Is that a good thing?
I’ve toyed with starting my own this past year. But I keep pulling up short. Here’s why.
Blogging is its own form at this point. It isn’t an essay. Nor is it a scholarly article. It has no length requirements: a blog post can be a sentence, a paragraph, 500 words, twice that, or twenty times that. Neither does blogging come with expectations of frequency. Some folks blog daily; others multiple times a day; others twice a week; others unpredictably, as a kind of clearinghouse for random ideas or thinking out loud.
Blogging is the shaggy dog of internet writing. It’s playful, experimental, occasional, topical, provisional, personal, tentative. It is inexpert, even when written by experts. It is off the cuff, even when polished and thought through.
And it is conversational, at its origins and in its form. It’s constantly linking, talking, referring, thinking out loud by bouncing ideas off of other ideas, typically found on other blogs. The so-called “blogosphere” really was a marvelous time to be on the internet. And it never died, though it shrunk, and its spirit lives on in various ways.
I understand how and why certain Substackers treat their new medium as a kind of Blog 2.0. But I don’t think it qualifies. Whatever Substack (along with its many peers and predecessors) is, and even if it is here to stay, it isn’t blogging.
I’m gratified to see Substack succeed, and I think all writers (and readers) should be grateful for its continued viability. The larger ecology of writers and writing has benefited tremendously from it. Writers are getting paid for their labor. Niche subjects are being funded by committed readers. I have more than a few friends who are finding and growing a readership by means of Substack. I subscribe to at least one or two dozen Substacks, and some of them make for essential reading.
But it’s not a blogging replacement, a blog-killer. And inasmuch as writers flock to Substack as the one real option today, I do think it has a certain distorting effect. For what Substack does is impose a certain discipline on its writers. The writing becomes formal, focused, and routinized. Writers produce at least one entry weekly, but typically two to three (or more) per week. Series abound. The word count is expansive. Not only are editors few and far between; quality, as in GRE grading, is tied to length. After all, it’s hard to justify subscriptions without regular, “meaty” posts.
Put charitably, it’s as though everyone is now a writer for Harper’s or First Things or the NYRB or NYT Magazine, only they produce copy at an outrageous rate. Put less charitably, the Substack-ification of writing makes an op-ed columnist out of everyone—except twice or thrice as prolific, minus the journalistic chops, and lacking in editorial oversight.
Hear me say: The net effect of Substack remains good. I don’t want it to go away. What I want is a diverse publishing environment, which includes but is not limited to Substack. Sure, it would be nice to lock in a concrete number of readers who chose to sign up for my newsletter. It would be lovely to start making one or two hundred bucks per month for my writing. It would be reassuring to my sensitive writer’s soul to know that, when I press “publish,” the post I’ve just crafted wasn’t just being launched into the void but into 50 or 500 or 1500 (or more!) inboxes the world over.
But my writing would suffer. I’d start writing like a Substacker. And I don’t want to write like that. I want to write books, journal articles, and magazine essays. And when I’m not doing that, I want to blog.
Kudos, then, and all good things to friends and colleagues who’ve found a home and an audience on Substack. As for me and my writing, however, we’ll stay here, on my own turf.
