You're 'The Central Place' Now

Pick yourself and the ones who want to talk to you.

Image credit: Joseph/Flickr.

Inside Higher Ed reports that Substack has more than doubled the number of academics publishing newsletters through the site, representing “‘thousands’ of new publications” and “a 42 percent increase in academic paid subscriptions.” IHE quotes five current and former academics — one of which quit his faculty position to go full-time doing his Substack — on why they do Substack newsletters. I counted at least seven reasons:

• They can consistently reach tens of thousands of readers without having to worry about the whims of a platform (ahem, Twitter and Facebook);

• They can publish when and on what they want, unlike with legacy media (ahem, New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, etc.);

• They can “play with ideas, float sparks of future academic work, but also ideas I have about the world that don’t fit in a piece for a publication” (that from Brian Klass, University College London associate professor of global politics and publisher of Substack The Garden of Forking Paths);

• They can test those ideas with their readers — “which means they’ll develop differently” than they would in a journal, argues Adam Mastroianni, post doc at Columbia Business School who publishes Experimental History;

• They can quickly gather collaborators for their best ideas and build momentum for grant applications around the ideas;

• They can gather information on topics from readers that can fuel future content (such as Emily Oster and her next book on “navigating pregnancy after prior complications); and

• Sometimes, they even gain supplemental income, if they take subscribers.

“I realized people would wake up, check their phones and, yes, read an email or watch a TikTok video, but they would also read an essay if you get them at the right time,” Erik Hoel, who quit his biology research professorship at Tufts to publish the Substack The Intrinsic Perspective, told IHE. He added he found the appetite for long-form research-based essays “unimaginatively powerful.”

This isn’t an advertisement for you to move to Substack ASAP. Consistently publishing a good newsletter is demanding; to do it, you should develop a content strategy, at lease a dozen kick-off topics, a healthy-sized list and a distribution plan.

But here’s what strikes me about that list of benefits: They’re very similar to the benefits I’ve been saying you get when you create a public expert ecosystem around your insights—a community to which you publish those insights directly and regularly, and a community that pushes you to make those insights better.

You can do that on Substack. You can also do it on IG, YouTube, Slack, Facebook, maybe Twitter still, and maybe Threads someday, and maybe just plain email or podcasting. But if you’re waiting for someone else to allow you to create that ecosystem through their platform, through their yes to your pitch or query, you’ll be waiting forever.

Michael Beam, director of emerging media and technology at Kent State, tells IHE that Substack is just another wave in the ongoing disruption of legacy media:

“For a long time in the blogosphere world, it was a place for dialogue. With Twitter, it was public dialogue,” Beam said. “I wouldn’t call Substack and (blogging host site) Medium as the central place for it now, but I don’t know if there is a central place.”

(Amazes me to see Medium and Substack lumped in the same sentence.)

Later in the article, Beam predicts that, in the wake of Twitter’s declension, the next “central place” will still be a single place:

“It won’t be the next big product; it’ll be who gets everyone to sign up,” he said. “We don’t end up where it’s the best practices or user interface. We end up where everyone else is.”

That strikes me as nostalgic, and skating to where the puck was. If Substack is a new “central place,” it’s a central place with no center—or with thousands of centers, each created by an individual public expert or group of experts.

From what I’m seeing, going forward there will be no “the” central place; only “your” central place.

You and your community need to create and grow your central place.