1,000 subscribers: the "Netflix of news" idea
N emails with a great question about the economics for readers with always limited resources wanting to support several independent journalists:
How much should each individual fund the universe of independent journalists?
So, if my budget is €100 - then your subscription is unaffordable and I can share my €100 around other worthy independent journalists too.
Now, if there were a platform where I could place my €200 each year and then allow the platform to share that income based on the sources I accessed - that would be great. But until then, what to do?
N is quite right. A single reader cannot support 100 independent journalists, even if he does enjoy all their reporting and analysis.
Nobody in the world has yet been able to do the "Netflix of news". Most journalists and columnists are employed by a particular newspaper or outlet, so their interest would almost never be to jump ship to something like that.
And each media outlet functions like a mini-Netflix, aggregating news and comment from a bunch of reporters and commentators, with perhaps a dozen or so outlets across the ideological spectrum in each country managing to survive over time.
Mix that with the ad revenues and the corporate people at each of those places are never going to give that up without a fight. Innovating it into existence might be possible but the tech part is easy, it already exists (publish articles code + subscription payment code).
I myself coded The Spain Report from scratch twice over the past 10 years to do exactly that. I imagine if I sat down in the New Year to do it a third time and we abstract things out a little, we would have the platform itself, the working website, up and running by Easter.
The hard thing is the network, the market, the energy mixed with events. This is why Twitter grew to be what it was and is still the only place for latest, breaking global news, the first place most of the photos, videos, updates and analysis appear, if you wade through the insults and the spam.
Substack is the latest reasonably successful attempt at something like that but a bit different and it’s because of the market bit, not the tech. Readers here understand that contributing to good writing on different topics makes that writing possible. Musk has been playing with direct subscriptions on X for some bigger names in the US, but it doesn’t work in Europe yet.
There were some big names in the States at the beginning who tried Substack (not sure how that has gone). It seems as though network effects, the snowball effect of more and more followers and subscribers, works on all of these networks, especially in the earlier stages, when it is all cool and new.
Bill Bishop’s excellent
, on China (“thousands” of paying subscribers), or Heather Cox Richardson’s (“tens of thousands” of paying subscribers) come to mind. Serious, knowledgeable, complex commentary about how a particular country is changing in this 21st century.The other option, which is where the angst comes from for readers, as N points out in his email, is a competition for their always limited resources, a need to prioritise and somehow choose “best”. A more Darwinian reality.
And this is before we get to what the money buys. Is it just “thanks for writing”, or access to subscriber-only articles or more contact with the author or some better version of the content? Here it is worth mentioning the sorry state of foreign correspondence economics in Spain. The papers habitually pay their stringers and reporters a pittance per article even for those in far-away countries or dangerous conflicts.
But travel and observation and discovery cost what they cost, up to a point, in time, energy and some money.
So certainly that’s what I want to do with The Spain Report for you, which is why I have decided on the 1,000 subscriber idea. Such a healthy reader team gets me doing reporting trips around the country a couple of times every month for us all, adding to my half a lifetime here, and the last 10 years of very in-depth reporting and analysis, and over time filters into all of the articles and increases our knowledge and insight into how the country is changing.
Everybody wins in such a virtuous spiral, as well as guaranteeing that valuable journalistic independence.