Patrons of Journalism
If not advertising, then what?
Advertising has always had an uneasy relationship with journalism. The uneasiness rises along with the rebelliousness of the journalists’ own self-image. Staid news operations can run all sorts of ads, secure in the sobriety of their own content; the alt-weeklies and underground papers and left wing rags and Playboy In Its Golden Age of Articles that fostered the freest writing and thinking attracted the ads for escort services and rock concerts and bong stores, businesses that would not be bothered if their ad ended up to a “fuck the police” essay.
For anyone reading this, most of the journalism that you have consumed for your entire lifetime has been primarily supported by advertising money. The industry settled on the self-regulated idea of a “Chinese wall” between the business side and the editorial side of publications, a separation that can be enforced zealously or can degenerate into a polite fiction, depending on the scrupulousness of the editorial side itself. The journalists most attached to their own anti-establishmentism can bristle even at this reality. At Gawker, I recall an incident where we took a screenshot of an ad on our own site, and then published a post mocking it. This led to a panicked meeting with the ad department at which a new rule was created that said we shouldn’t, you know, do that. We were making enough money at the time to laugh about it.
In retrospect, bitching about ads—though philosophically valid—was a luxury problem. Today, enormous tech platforms have monopolized much of the ad money that used to be spent directly at news publications. Many alt-weeklies have gone extinct; glossy, ad-heavy magazines are a thing of the past; the online news sites that were once seen as the looming threat to traditional journalism have themselves been wiped out by Google and Facebook’s ability to suck up their advertisers.
Still, advertising alongside journalism lives on—often, today, at more niche, boutique publications that command ideologically coherent audiences that very specific advertisers seek. For writers like me, who are trying to build sustainable micro-publications amid the rubble of the industry we came up in, this is good news. Subscription revenue is valuable but hard-won, and can fluctuate with macroeconomic trends that make individual readers feel richer or poorer. Ad money could be a crucial stabilizer, the difference between small publications fizzling out or continuing to grow.
With more than 41,000 subscribers, How Things Work is big enough to sell ads. Not evil ads, but ads or sponsorships from, maybe, progressive organizations or unions or other groups aligned with the tone and readership of the site. A little research told me that by not having any ads here, I am leaving an amount of money on the table that is very substantial, for a small publication like mine.
So last week I sat down to make a profile on a site that connects publishers to advertisers. There I was, filling out forms about my paid subscriber percentage and average open rate and clicks per month. After an hour or so of this. I stopped. I closed the tab and I never opened it again. I could feel the slippery slope slipping, and I didn’t like it.
The pernicious thing that I felt in that moment is not just the vague and nagging feeling that advertising is bad—as a matter of real world journalism ethics, “It’s fine for the New York Times to sell ads to anyone who knocks on their door but shoestring independent media publications should not even sell ads to nonprofits who are doing good things” is a pretty counterproductive position. No, what bothered me is that I could feel the focus of my mind turning to the question of how to sell ads. I could feel my mental energy being allocated to questions of finance and marketing. This is bad. I only have a certain amount of mental energy and focus to begin with. Every bit of it that is being used to figure out how to sell ads is not being used to think about what I am writing here.
I am aware of how simplistic this sounds. But it’s true. The writing on this site is the product of a mind that gets to use most of its energy on thinking about the actual issues I am writing about. (You’d think the writing would be better, right? Sorry!). Perhaps there are other writers, steely machines, who can compartmentalize the personal and business and editorial operations of their minds with the efficiency of computers, leaving each bucket insulated and unaffected by the operations of the others. That’s not me. If I want to write anything “good,” I need to mostly be thinking about that thing. I need to use most of my mind to learn about it and read about it and go and look at it and ponder and turn over thoughts and conclusions and sentences and paragraphs until I can put them on the page. (Bullshit job, right? I know). If I am spending a significant portion of my time thinking about marketing my publication and selling ads, there is no way that the writing here will not become less thoughtful. It’s just arithmetic. I only have so much brainpower to go around. I could deny this reality, but for myself, I would still know that it’s true.
This quandary—which applies to any writer who is operating solo, and does not employ a staff who can take these marketing and finance tasks off their plate—got me thinking about other ways of filling these gaps. In the old days, people of means were commonly patrons of the arts. The Medicis, and whatnot. There is a long history of rich people running high quality publications just because they want to, and can afford it. Some of today’s billionaires still dabble in this: The Atlantic, for example, is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, whose net worth is $12 billion. She retains enough enthusiasm for journalism to keep The Atlantic robust enough to have hired 50 journalists last year. “I want to build the greatest collective of nonfiction writers in the English speaking world,” Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg boasted last week. The Atlantic indeed has a number of very good writers. But given the publication’s prevailing ideology, if it is the greatest collective of nonfiction writers we have, we are all in deep trouble.
Praying for billionaires to save us is a fool’s game. Better to pray for billionaires to be destroyed. It’s worth noting that some of the journalists The Atlantic hired recently were laid off from the Washington Post by another, even richer, billionaire. An industry full of journalists on our knees all hoping to be fortunate enough to kiss the feet of the next momentarily beneficent oligarch is an unhealthy place for us to be.
The vast majority of How Things Work’s revenue comes from—and will continue to come from—a relatively small percentage of readers who pay six bucks a month or $60 a year. Being directly reader-supported is ideal for any writer, but growing this base in order to keep the publication stable and growing is a grind, and one that is getting more difficult as more writers are forced to compete for similar pools of readers.
There is at least one obvious way to address this. I have a very small group of subscribers who pay more than the listed subscription price. They are, in essence, donating to support this publication, in the same way you would donate to any worthy cause. (One reader in particular, who is too modest to be named, has made several annual donations to me that have given me the freedom to do more on-the-ground reporting. Even a basic reporting trip of less than a week can easily cost a couple grand, so these donations have been a significant help.) It does not require a billion dollars to be a patron of journalism. A handful of five-figure donations could provide significant financial stability, support reporting budgets, and, crucially, replace the revenue that would be coming in if I went to the trouble of having ads and a paywall on this site.
What I am talking about are upper middle class people becoming sponsors of journalism. Most readers cannot afford a large donation. But some can. And it only takes a few, really, to supplement the existing subscriber base in a way that would make it reasonable to say, “I don’t need to worry about selling ads on here.” If you spend some time looking at wealth distribution statistics, you will see that while the overall percentage of people who can make five-figure donations without feeling it is small, it encompasses a number of people that implies that hundreds of readers of this site could do it.
Of course, while I’m arguing for my own publication here, the larger and more worthwhile underlying point is one that I feel an obligation to raise periodically: If you think that journalism and good writing and quality information in general is a valuable public good, it is really important that you support it financially. In the past, it was supported by ad revenue, so you didn’t have to think about supporting it directly. Now it is not. We all need to pay. If we don’t, two things will happen: A lot of journalism will simply disappear; and a lot of the remaining journalism will retreat behind paywalls, where it will become a luxury good, a trend that is itself detrimental to the public good. If you are a person who has a lot of money, and you can sponsor a writer that you think is valuable, you should consider doing it. A donation that can be very substantial to a journalist is still a small fraction of what wealthy people might donate to other cultural institutions, which are sure to spend more of it on shiny advertising and champagne than any journalist will.
I have been a writer long enough to appreciate the fact that it is a gift for any of us to be able to do this for a living. Maybe one day that will require a paywall and ads on this site. For now, it doesn’t, and that is a gift in itself. It means that I can see every reader as equally valuable, and it means that I can write what I want without having to think about navigating the feelings of various advertisers. Even if you think that I, personally, am the world’s biggest moron—a defensible stance!—I hope that you recognize that as a general matter, it is great benefit to America to have as many writers as possible running around with an audience and the ability to say exactly what they think. When that fades away, it leaves behind something much more grim.
Great
If you would like to give money to support How Things Work, you can email me: Hamilton.Nolan@gmail.com. (You can do the same for any other journalist, I assure you. We are not registered nonprofits, we are just regular people.) If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, you can click the link below. If you can’t afford to, that’s fine! The whole point of this system is to keep the site free for everyone to read. Keep coming back, my friends.
Related reading: The Slow Assassination of the Free Press; Incuriosity, Inc; Where Does News Come From?; What Was Gawker?
I agree with most of what you have written here.
I strongly disagree with your (I know intended as humorous) statement: " (You’d think the writing would be better, right? Sorry!)."
My problem with your solution is that, at such point that I may become able to make a significant financial contribution to journalism, how am I to decide which journalist to support? You would definitely be on my short list, but do I then cross my fingers hoping someone else will finance my other favorite writers? This is something I have been struggling with ever since I started reading Substack posts. I do not have unlimited funds to sign up for paid subscriptions (let alone five figure largess). I have been hoping someone will come up with some sort of system whereby we, the readers, could create bundles of posts to subscribe to at a single yearly price. I don't know if this would pencil out to provide you (or any other single writer) with a higher and more consistent revenue stream, but perhaps it could be a win/win.
In the meantime, I am grateful every time I find one of your posts in my inbox, am happy to be a paid subscriber, and you will be on the top of my list when my ship comes in ;).
Just a note to say that I wouldn't mind seeing the type of advertising you mention, although ads from the Teamsters these days might make me giggle. But I understand that you don't want, now, to spend limited time on managing advertisers. If you change your mind about it, maybe think of it as time that you might spend promoting a book? Those interviews and bookstore visits take time, but it's an investment in getting your work supported. (I understand that that's different from an outside advertiser, where some conflict with reporting may present itself.) As always, I'm a happy subscriber. Thank you for your words and your work, and thanks go to your anonymous benefactor. They're good people, whoever they are.