At the Substack Post, we learn of new investment in the basic idea behind Substack, the do-it-yourself publication center that so many well-known journalists are moving to. Co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi announce,

Today, we’re announcing $100 million in Series C funding, led by investors at BOND and The Chernin Group (TCG), with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Rich Paul, CEO and founder of Klutch Sports Group, and Jens Grede, CEO and co-founder of SKIMS. BOND’s Mood Rowghani will join our board. We’re thrilled to partner with these investors, who bring a wealth of experience across tech, media, and culture, as we put this capital to work serving creators and their communities.

“A media future” to believe in, July 17, 2025

Essentially, if readers support a writer on Substack, a number of traditional intervening layers are removed:

The model is working—across writing, audio, video, and communities—and this funding lets us go further. We’re doubling down on the Substack app, which is designed to help audiences reclaim their attention and connect with the creators they care about. We aim to prove that a media app can be fun and rewarding without melting your brain. An escape from the doomscroll, and a place to take back your mind. “Media future”

Revenge of the Twitter files?

Matt Taibbi’s Twitter files on censorship in the Covid era demonstrated clearly that large media organizations, electronic or otherwise, are surprisingly easily controlled by government. It’s always a fight but a venue that simply lets the writer reach readers independently should be welcome to those whose message, while honest, is not music to the ears of a social or political elite.

Substack seems to be one iteration of a throwaway line from Elon Musk: “Don’t hate the media, become the media.” New media technologies liberate the writer from many dependencies.

One outcome of the changes in media environment is the decline of many older media, which depended on a strict separation between a few content providers and a vast mass of content absorbers. The audiences for these legacy media audiences are aging and they tend to be richer than average, thus often out of touch.

The recent kerfuffle over CBS’s impending cancelation of the Stephen Colbert late-night talk show is a case in point. Many see it as an instance of censorship because Colbert was an energetic critic of U.S. President Donald Trump.

But with media in so much flux today, these waters are muddy, as Joe Berkowitz notes at Fast Company:

Between the political exhaustion that followed the 2020 election and a steady increase in cord-cutting in U.S. households, late-night TV ratings have fallen steadily for five years. Colbert now receives an average of 2.47 million viewers per show, down more than a million from his 2018-2019 peak. Late-night ad revenue fell by half from 2018 to 2024, from $439 million to just $220 million. Even Trump’s return to the White House, with all its attendant chaos, couldn’t entice viewers back to late night this year, with ratings down across the board even from last fall.

“Why Colbert’s cancellation is lighting a fire under every late-night host,” July 23, 2025

Thus the broad trend is toward more people generating smaller, more mobile media, much more cheaply and much closer to readers. The legends will live on but new legends will arise too.