Austrian industry magazine Horizont recently reported on the unexpected economic success of news service Substack in the US. After a slow start in 2017, the scale recently rose to more than 1 million paid subscriptions.
Paid newsletter subscriptions??
The business concept is amazing: Substack collects the best and most prominent authors by offering them 2 advantages over the traditional media world: 1. no content control by publishers, editor-in-chief or the like, and 2. a 90% share of the revenue generated.
The business concept could be transferred easily also to legal contents: one looks for the most prominent, shrillest specialists and offers to them a weekly column against absolute maximum fee. The authors take over the marketing through their mere availability.
The catch: the business concept inevitably leads to exaggeration and selective reporting. - In the past, this would have been called puffery. Now, I am not an enemy of the boulevard; it rightly has its place in the media world. But specialist information for experts must remain objective and predictable.