Is Substack the saviour of local media?

Also: how much ad revenue does a top podcast make?

Long term readers of my writing on Medium will know that, at the end of each year, I like to make a few predictions for the coming months. This is an exercise that people seem to enjoy and either makes me seem very stupid or very prescient. In order to mitigate the former, I tend to go for quite general trends whose success I can always, just about, argue for.

One of the predictions I’ve made a few times, which hasn’t really come true, is the return of localised news. My feeling is that digital media offers a lot of mechanical advantages for the distribution of local news, which, combined with a general current of decentralisation, could be effectively exploited. I’ll do myself the credit of saying that we’ve seen some localisation in podcasting, though not a great deal, but, in point of fact, things have at times moved in the opposite direction. Particularly striking, to me at least, was the line spoken by The Athletic’s founder Alex Mather in an interview about his publication with the New York Times. “We will wait every local paper out,” he told the Times, “and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing. We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

The Athletic has now been sold to the New York Times, a local paper (in its broadest definition).

Anyway, an area where people are innovating with local news is Substack. Hey, you’re reading this on Substack! So you know what Substack is: essentially a premium newsletter service, Mailchimp meets Patreon. In the past couple of years they’ve been throwing a lot of money at funding writers and publications with interesting angles, including a lot of local news both in the UK and abroad. The Mill, for example, is, self-described as, “Greater Manchester’s quality newspaper”. This despite never having been printed on paper (“delivered via email to 20,000 readers” they also add).

Marie Le Conte, an author and journalist who used to host my flagship politics podcast, Polling Politics, has just launched one of these localised Substacks. So I dialled her up to do a 15/20 minute video interview which you can watch below.