Substack Faces Backlash Over Deal With The Free Press

Just a year after Substack earned the ire of over 200 of its publishers for keeping Nazi-leaning content monetized on the platform, it’s kind of doing it again. This time with the controversial journalist Bari Weiss.

The digital publishing platform announced Tuesday a partnership with Weiss to launch what it calls an “enterprise offering” for “big-vision publishers”— which, somewhat vaguely, is a “fully-fledged media business, encompassing rich design, advanced websites, deep analytics, automated marketing features, and first-class support for video, audio, and more.” 

The offering rolls out with a relaunch of Weiss’s The Free Press. It’s unclear how the partnership will change the site — Weiss said in July that her publication has more than 750,000 subscribers on the platform, with more than 100,000 paying the $8/month or $80/year full-access subscription.

But the problem, the platform’s publishers argue, is the idea that this is what Substack thinks is a publication with a “commitment to pursuing high-integrity journalism” deserving of a “fully-fledged media business.” A publication that, as The Verge points out, has been called “a publication that has spread misinformation on transgender youth and amplified harmful anti-trans rhetoric.”

“I see the founders have learned nothing,” Marisa Kabas wrote, alluding to last year’s incident. She was one of the independent journalists who left the platform last year.

This has renewed calls for publishers to leave the platform. “If you want to be part of a conservative social network fine, but you’re not building anything real. You’re giving them 10% of your revenue to fund their culture war and they’re going to keep locking your audience behind their walled garden,” Ryan Broderick, another independent journalist who left the platform, wrote.

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