A little more than a year ago, newsletter darling Substack announced a million-dollar initiative to help fund local journalism. How’d that turn out? As Andrew Federov reports for the (non-Substack) media newsletter The Fine Print, not great.
In some instances, Substack did step in to offer business support. “Substack put up a round of Facebook ads for us, but that was an absolute failure,” Stephenson said. “It netted us a bunch of angry grandparents who didn’t know what they had subscribed to or why, and they just sent us angry emails about it.”
Get the Longreads Weekly Email