“You are the media now.”

If Oxford were to have a “phrase of the year,” it might be that single little line, which, if you kept in touch with the media’s pulse over the last few months, makes a lot of sense.

2024 was arguably the year of the meteoric rise of the independent creator and the calamitous fall of the so-called legacy media. More than any other time in the digital era, it’s obvious that people with no ties to the gatekeeping institutions of our culture can create and distribute videos, journalism, and literature. You don’t have to send a million stories to The New Yorker anymore, only to be rejected. You can post your own commentary on Substack (and maybe get read more). You don’t have to blow your bank account to move to Los Angeles and audition a thousand times just to get a paltry role in a sitcom show. You can broadcast yourself, for free, on YouTube, TikTok, or Twitch, and make some real money from it.

The creator economy in 2024 has challenged the old vanguards of journalism. The 2024 election cycle shed a lot of light on the discrepancies between reality and the media report. For months, concerns over President Joe Biden’s mental acuity were dismissed as right-wing attempts to delegitimize his candidacy. It was only after Biden’s terrible debate performance against Donald Trump in June of 2024 that a multitude of liberals, including those at MSNBC, acknowledged the president’s cognitive decline. Reportage in the post-Trump era has been riddled with bias and laced with political agenda. It can be hard to find examples of honest reporting these days. And both sides of the political spectrum have been guilty of biased reporting. The more outlets and social media accounts we have, the easier it gets for journalistic institutions to cater to a certain perspective instead of reporting the truth, plain and simple.

Enter a platform like Substack, where writers of all kinds can build a profile and a list of subscribers and post articles at will, without editorial oversight. As a Substacker myself, I’ve enjoyed reading a number of provocative, informative, and entertaining accounts, like Ted Gioia’s The Honest Broker, The Free Press, Story Club by fiction writer George Saunders, and Pens and Poison, among many others. I have my own Substack channel called Battle the Bard where I share more creative and personal writing, including short stories, essays, and poems.

The Future of the Creator Economy

Substack has taken the concept of the blog and reemerged holding the future of the creator economy. Hundreds of otherwise hidden gems have found their way into the light through Substack, bypassing the old gatekeepers and earning their own eager audiences.

I’m personally a big fan of Substack, and it’s become a primary staple in my media diet. I also benefit from a number of YouTube podcasts from independent creators, and X includes its own stream of interesting people posting good food for thought.

Not everyone is so pleased by Substack and the weakening of mainstream media, though. Its lack of editorial oversight allows for a lot of bad writing, critics say, and the platform should never replace “actual” journals like The Washington Post and The New York Times. Substack writers Sam Kahn and Becca Rothfeld got into a bit of an online spat (on Substack) about the significance of the platform. Kahn points out that a number of literary heavy lifters didn’t initially get noticed by the Big Five publishing groups. The names include Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allen Poe, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka. Your typical literature course (provided it still teaches books from the Western canon) will almost always feature at least one of these people. And yet many of them started out by self-publishing their writing.

That’s essentially what Substack is: Self-publishing. It’s a way for writers to put their words out there without toiling through the multiple steps you typically have to go through to get published and noticed. Now, this obviously means that there is going to be loads of stuff on Substack that may not be very much worth reading. But then again, there’s also loads of stuff in the legacy media that proves even worse upon investigation. The really good writers on Substack creating interesting work are hopefully going to get noticed, and they’re going to be upheld as good by broad consensus. This doesn’t mean that audience always entails quality, but Substack does provide a direct writer to read connection like no other platform on the internet right now. Substack honors an old tenet of the writing life. Putting words on a page is ultimately a way of forming relationships with other people. When you read a great novel, you’re conversing with the author, even if the book was published two hundred years ago.

The problem now is that a lot of the articles, books, and film getting published through traditional means simply aren’t that good. Big publishers used to compete with each other over who got to publish the next Faulkner, but now literary fiction is a relic of the past, and the major presses are more interested in what sells instead of fighting for what’s good. Elizabeth Kaye Cooke and Melanie Jennings write,

Over the last decades the Big Five have decided that the safe money is on “auto-buy” readerships and genre hits: “romantasy” series, celebrity memoirs, and established earners like Kristin Hannah and Nicholas Sparks. This makes sense, if you think like a machine beholden to algorithms and shareholders. Instead of an eye-blackening scrum over who gets to publish the next Tom Wolfe, nobody’s quite sure that his fresh, satirical voice is worth chancing in the first place. As a consequence of this mode of thinking, literary fiction has fallen to only two percent of the fiction market. From the publishers’ perspective literary fiction is just too risky — and that risk has nothing to do with questions of form or taste. It’s much more simple and less political than that.

When marketability becomes more vital than literary quality, you can expect the literary culture to suffer, and for the survivors to flock where they can actually share work and find an audience. More and more, that place is Substack. While I don’t believe the old journals should close their gates, they need a serious dose of self-reflection if they want to regain relevance. Otherwise, more of us are just going to get everything we need at the media mart that’s selling the good stuff.