The best example of subscriber-based dynamism can be found in the saga of the employee-owned sports and culture site Defector. Defector was started by Deadspin’s editorial staffers, who walked off the job in 2019 following a dispute with management, to essentially produce the same product. Defector, which has attracted tens of thousands of subscribers, is every bit as good as the free Deadspin. Some would say better. The downside of subscriptions is a much smaller Defector audience than Deadspin had, reducing its cultural impact. It’s an unavoidable trade-off for such niche or special interest media.

Muckraker George Seldes, one of America’s most accomplished independent journalists, built his paper-and-postage newsletter, In fact, into a 176,000-circulation phenomenon in the late 1940s, outpacing the circulation of both the New Republic and the Nation. Every bit as edgy in his journalistic approach as such Substack all-stars as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias or Matt Taibbi, Seldes should have gloried in his triumph. Instead, he was depressed by his lack of mass reach. No matter how hard he tried, he lamented in his final issue that he couldn’t connect very far beyond the “$5 liberals” who subscribed to In fact. He wanted a mass audience that would allow him to keep pace with the big newspapers that reached a million subscribers. He wanted his words to land as hard as theirs. Instead, the elite audience he’d cultivated became too much of an echo chamber.