Substack Pro: For Big-Vision Editor-in-Chiefs running a substack publication with multiple writers and editors
Publishing Industry news update. Business lingo: I say "Pro", you say "Enterprise"; it's all a reference to the same Big Things
“The Editor-in-Chief is the top leader and decision-maker of a digital magazine or publication. They are responsible for the publication’s overall vision, content strategy, and quality…” (ChatGPT, here, for a breakdown of the Editor-in-Chief ’s key functions)
On Tues, Dec 17, the co-founders of Substack (Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, Jairaj Sethi) announced they’ve rolled-out advanced publishing features for Editor-in-Chiefs [Publishers] running substack publications with multiple writers and editors.
I’ll get to the details of Substack’s announcement in a moment, but, when I read it, I immediately thought of Celia Farber’s recent essay on magazine editorship, titled in part, “[…] Make Publishing And Editing Great Again By Bringing Back Editors As Pollinators” (link)
I encourage you to read Celia’s essay in it’s entirety. Here is an excerpt:
The editor is the editor—responsible not only for “authority” but for inspiration. Letting writers know what we see in them and how grateful we are for the chance to publish their writings. Many will have their own Substacks and won’t need any of this. But many, especially those who were around back then, may welcome it.
Synergy.
[…]
A healthy relationship between editor and writer creates a very fruitful terrain of win-win.
When one had a major magazine that paid to industry standard, the pursuit of writers was usually easy and fruitful. Story ideas emerged from long lunches and phone conversations, but above all—mutual attention being paid.
Writers, being crazy, usually had hunches worth indulging and assigning. Sometimes pieces go bust—that’s ok. They should not, merely, produce themselves like fruits of lonely orange trees.
[…]
I love finding, working with, and publishing writers. And we treat one another with respect and professionalism. And that’s how we grow.
[…]
I don’t think everybody should work alone, despite the wonders of Substack; Editors are to writers as bees are to flowers. Editors pollinate and generate. Writers used to break stories precisely, or partly, because they wanted to fulfill an editor’s unspoken expectation of the craft. It was synergic.
A note about Substack’s announcement: Bari Weiss’s The Free Press is the first substack publication to have access to these features:
As we develop the toolset through an extended private beta over the coming year, we plan to take features designed for The Free Press and make them available for general use in Substack.
Weiss’s announcement to her readership—what it means for them, here.
Substack’s announcement reads in part (emphasis added in bold):
[The Free Press] showcases a model that, in the years ahead, will give big-vision publishers [Editor-in-Chiefs] a new option for starting a fully-fledged media business, encompassing rich design, advanced websites, deep analytics, automated marketing features, and first-class support for video, audio, and more.
Substack will always be dedicated to helping individuals and small teams publish across formats, build an audience, and make money from subscriptions, but we also want to support publishers’ [Editor-in-Chiefs’] ambitions as they grow on the platform. With that in mind, we are building a toolset that will allow high-volume publishers with sophisticated needs—including custom branding, website design, and support for large editorial teams—to take advantage of Substack’s best-in-class publishing system while also being plugged into a network that drives subscriptions.
We’re partnering with The Free Press to build this first version of Substack’s enterprise [pro] offering while we learn how to best support organizations of this nature. This work will benefit all publishers on the platform. As we develop the toolset through an extended private beta over the coming year, we plan to take features designed for The Free Press and make them available for general use in Substack.
[…]
We’re excited by the potential of matching these advanced content management tools with the power of Substack’s network effects, anchored by audience-sharing features such as recommendations and the Substack app [for mobile phones.] [Learn more about the Substack app, here]. For publications across the platform, the Substack app now drives 50% of all subscriptions and 30% of paid subscriptions.
We anticipate many more outlets like The Free Press to be built on Substack in the future, benefiting not only from the elegance and simplicity of the platform’s publishing tools, but also by being part of an ecosystem of intelligent readers and consumers who are hungry for quality media.
My comment (link) to Substack’s announcement:
Excited by the forthcoming platform features. Powerful, when combined with Substack’s network effects.
And, as 2025 unfolds, if the likes of Puck, Semafor, HellGate (hellgatenyc[dot]com), Bob Guccione Jr’s (wonderlusttravel[dot]com), Virgil Davis Hunt’s Nashville Pamphleteer (pamphleteer[dot]co ; note ‘co’ not ‘com’), and Michigan Enjoyer (enjoyer[dot]com) will migrate over…
Any updates on the “revive Life magazine” venture (March 2024) put together by model/entrepreneur Karlie Kloss and her billionaire tech investor husband Joshua Kushner?
“Karlie Kloss and Joshua Kushner announce plan to revive Life magazine; Model and investor husband’s company Bedford Media to bring photography publication back to print and digital distribution | by Maya Yang | Guardian | Mar 28, 2024” (link)
To add: Wikipedia: Life magazine:
In [March] 2024 it was announced that Bedford Media (owned by Karlie Kloss and Joshua Kushner) would be reviving [Life] magazine in an agreement with Dotdash Meredith. (link) [also: link]
As I continue to ponder Substack’s announcement, I’ll leave you with this related case study:
Host Isaac Simpson — The Carousel Podcast, and Virgil Davis Hunt — the Founder/Editor-in-Chief of Nashville Pamphleteer, discuss “The Return of Local Culture Journalism” (link)
Here an except of the podcast:
Nashville is a Place. “[…] No one’s cracked the nut on how to do a sustainable local media outlet. The business model was eradicated in the 2000s with the emergence of the internet. And digital ads, Facebook, Google, obviously ate up all the ad revenue that was previously going to papers. And so it seemed like an interesting space to try to figure out a workable business model. So, you know, it’s appealing on two fronts. One, there’s a specific business challenge. Can you come up with this formula that enables a local media outlet, not just to exist for a couple of years and then go away, but to flourish and to ultimately, you know, climb to some position of prominence within a city. I think that’s an interesting problem to solve for, because I do think that Gannett-owned papers like the Tennessean here are just, you know, they’re slowly on their way out. They’re obviously declining. It’s overstated how kind of anemic they are compared to their past form. And even the Nashville Scene used to be like 200 pages and it came out every week. And now it’s, I don’t know, 50 pages. And there’s just a lot that you lose without that.” — Virgil Davis Hunt [starting at the 27m23s mark. Note: exact quote starts at 31m35s]
Tom Kudla is the Executive Producer to Writer Jon Rappoport on substack by day, and a [Travel] Writer on substack by night.