The controversies around Substack miss the point that it is just a tool for sovereign writers, who are in control as they are paid directly by subscribers
Manage your Stratechery subscription. — There has been a bit of controversy around Substack over the last week … Tweets: @mohamed , @nbj914 , @paulconstant , @grimmelm , @susie_c , @lorcand , @jessesingal , @kantrowitz , and @carnage4life Tweets: Mohamed Nanabhay / @mohamed : “I suspect we have only begun to appreciate how destructive this new reality will be for many media organizations....” @benthompson on Sovereign Writers and Substack https://stratechery.com/... Nicholas Jackson / @nbj914 : 11,000 more words about Subtack, from @benthompson ("I would bet that publications start being stricter about this [letting employees start newsletters] going forward") https://stratechery.com/... and @SethAbramson ("the best digital platform I've ever used") https://sethabramson.substack.com/ ... Paul Constant / @paulconstant : I'm seeing people refer to Substack and other subscription-supported writers as “sovereign writers.” That's incredibly bad framing. All good writing—especially good journalism—is collaborative. James Grimmelmann / @grimmelm : This @stratechery column is helpful, but if anything I don't think it goes far enough. Substack wants to be a platform, but its business niche looks more like magazine subscription and distribution, only easier to get into. https://stratechery.com/... Susie Cagle / @susie_c : Wait hold up so according to this, Substack processes each subscription separately? instead of lumping them together? which would save a lot in processing fees for both platform and writer? https://stratechery.com/... Lorcan Dempsey / @lorcand : “ ... the real reason why the media has reason to fear Substack: it's not that Substack will compete with existing publications for their best writers, but rather that Substack makes it easy for the best writers to discover their actual market value.” https://stratechery.com/... https://twitter.com/... Jesse Singal / @jessesingal : One of the only sane things that has been written about the fake Substack scandal, and it's just as much about the future of media and how the newsletter economy selects for punditry over reporting. Worth a read. https://stratechery.com/... Alex Kantrowitz / @kantrowitz : “The beautiful thing about being my own boss is that they don't determine my success; my subscribers do, just as they do every author on Substack.” https://stratechery.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Substack is a threat to the media because popular writers can make more money from subscriptions than a journalism gig. The Internet unbundled ads from newspapers and is now unbundling journalists from news sites as well. The business model is under siege https://stratechery.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Stratechery's piece lands mid-controversy: Substack's founders have long insisted they run a platform, not a media company, but the recent criticism — and Substack's own disclosure of its Pro program paying 30+ writers after backlash — shows the platform-versus-publisher line blurring. Ben Thompson's argument is that the framing is wrong: writers paid directly by subscribers are 'sovereign,' so editorial control sits with them, not Substack.
The counterpoint in the coverage is that sovereignty is unevenly distributed — many of Substack's top earners are polarizing figures deplatformed elsewhere, which is why the funding decisions read as editorial even when Substack denies being a publisher.
First-order effects
- Substack's Pro payments to selected writers are now legible as editorial choices about what kind of writing the platform wants to exist, whatever the founders' tool-not-publisher framing claims.
- Writers like Alex Kantrowitz and Jesse Singal — named in the controversy — operate with direct subscriber revenue, meaning their livelihoods no longer route through newsroom employment or ad platforms.
Second-order effects
- Traditional media organizations face the competitive threat Mohamed Nanabhay flagged: popular writers can out-earn newsroom salaries on subscriptions, giving them exit options that weaken institutional employment.
- Every's later analysis of the mobile app shows the knock-on constraint — growth mechanics (apps, discovery) pull Substack toward the publisher behaviors its authors-first ideology forbids.
Third-order effects
- If the sovereign-writer model holds, moderation debates migrate from platform policy to individual writers' own subscriber bases — but Substack's growth commitments keep re-creating the publisher role it disclaims, making the platform/publisher distinction structurally unstable.
- The pattern points toward a media economy split between direct-funded writers and ad-funded institutions, with the funding mechanism, not editorial standards, determining who bears moderation responsibility.
The trend: Subscription-funded writing is shifting editorial control from institutions to individual writers, while the platforms serving them keep drifting back toward publisher-like responsibilities as they chase growth.