The first week of March, Patrice Peck, a freelance journalist living in New York, started sanitizing everything. She went to Nitehawk, a dine-in movie theater, and brought Clorox to wipe down the little table by her seat, her drinking glass, the utensils. In those early days, she felt like she was the only one obsessing over the coronavirus. As the pandemic spread, she started exchanging updates with a friend via text message and calling her grandmother in Jamaica to discuss the situation there. Peck anticipated that Black people would be hit the hardest, and that this aspect of the story would not receive enough coverage. “It was just very obvious to me,” she said.

By April, shelter-in-place orders were in effect. Peck—who is thirty-three and stylish, lately with cat-eye glasses and short hair—was holed up in her apartment. She and her partner set up to work side by side, their laptops perched on the kitchen island; Peck scoured the internet for news as Black people in America began dying from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, at twice the rate of whites. “I wanted to write something that would be valuable to readers and informative and empowering, particularly to Black audiences,” she said. So she did what so many other independent journalists were doing—she started a Substack.

Substack, established in 2017 by three tech-and-media guys—Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi—is a newsletter platform that allows writers and other creative types to distribute their work at tiered subscription rates. Newsletters go back at least as far as the Middle Ages, but these days, with full-time jobs at stable media companies evaporating—between the 2008 recession and 2019, newsroom employment dropped by 23 percent—Substack offers an appealing alternative. And, for many, it’s a viable source of income. In three years, Substack’s newsletters—covering almost every conceivable topic, from Australian Aboriginal rights to bread recipes to local Tennessee politics—have drawn more than two hundred fifty thousand paid subscribers. The top newsletter authors can earn six figures, an unheard-of amount for freelance journalists. Emily Atkin, who runs Heated, on the climate crisis, told me that her gross annual income surpassed $200,000—and among paid-readership Substacks, she’s ranked fifteenth. “I literally opened my first savings account,” she said.

Peck had been mulling the idea of starting a newsletter for a while. She began thinking seriously about Substack when she saw Beauty IRL, a newsletter by Darian Harvin. Like Peck, Harvin is a freelancer—it was “really a matter of time” until she was laid off from one media job or another, she figured—and she was using Substack as a place for surplus ideas. “I take some of my pitches and just write them for my newsletter,” Harvin said. “Publications are only paying me three hundred dollars per piece, so I thought, What would happen if I took some of them and grew my audience?” Her efforts were getting noticed; eventually, Substack gave her a $3,000 stipend and a $25,000 advance (in the latter arrangement, Substack takes 50 percent of her subscription fees until the advance is paid off, but if she doesn’t reach that number, Harvin won’t owe Substack the rest).

Peck settled on a name for her project: Coronavirus News for Black Folks. She’d produce it a few times a week, with a reading list of recommended articles and original interviews with Black essential workers, accompanied by images she’d commission from Black illustrators. At least at the start, she decided, her newsletter would be free—she wanted her writing to be accessible, especially as Black people were suffering disproportionately from the pandemic-induced economic downturn. Her first installments were about Black men afraid of being racially profiled for wearing masks and coronavirus conspiracies circulating online; the tone was direct and conversational. (“As Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar famously said about covid-19, ‘Sh*t is getting real,’ ” Peck wrote in an early dispatch.) After a couple weeks, Adriana Lacy, another Black journalist, interviewed Peck for her own Substack—The Intersection, focused on journalism, technology, and innovation—and Nieman Lab picked it up. A month into developing her newsletter, Peck had nine hundred seventy-eight subscribers. Not long after, that number rose to two thousand.

Peck quickly recognized the possibilities of Substack: a wandering journalist, disenchanted by an industry that was never all that equitable to begin with and is now in financial free fall, could, perhaps, claim control of her work. As more people signed up for Coronavirus News for Black Folks, Peck imagined all the ways it might grow, and wondered whether it could become a full-time job. “In an ideal world, I’m the editor in chief or editor at large of the newsletter; I’m using it to allow other journalists who like to cover these communities to have a place to write,” she mused. “And I’m able to compensate them during a time when there are so many layoffs.”

Patrice Peck When she started Coronavirus News for Black Folks, Peck was the sole producer of an ambitious project.

Substack started the same way many media ventures do—with a personal essay. In 2017, Best, a programmer from a Vancouver suburb who cofounded a messaging app called Kik, had taken some time off work and, finding himself an avid reader, began thinking about writing something himself. He drafted a piece bemoaning how the journalism industry’s failing business models incentivized clicks, retweets, and likes over incisive prose. At the time, the media apocalypse was in full force—the limits of digital media were apparent (that year, Mic and Vice instituted mass layoffs after bowing to Facebook in an ill-fated “pivot to video”) and legacy media was bleeding (Condé Nast faced perennial ad revenue loss; a desperate Tribune Publishing changed its name to Tronc). “Now we’re in this world where social media feeds optimize for engagement, because that’s how they make money, and just as kind of an unintentional collateral damage they end up amplifying all the things that drive us crazy,” Best argued. “It’s bad for us as readers and bad for society.” Best sent a first draft to McKenzie, with whom he’d worked at Kik.

“He was like, ‘First of all, you’re a bad writer and you shouldn’t do this,’ ” Best recalled. In McKenzie’s telling, he gently informed Best that he thought he was stating the obvious: everyone in media already understood what the problems were; what was missing was a solution. Before working in technology, McKenzie had grown up in a small town on the South Island of New Zealand and attended journalism school with the hope of becoming a foreign correspondent. He spent four years in Hong Kong, where he ended up writing mostly about indie music and drinking dens. Later, he worked as a reporter for PandoDaily, a tech news site, then transitioned into writing for companies—first Tesla, then Kik. McKenzie encouraged Best to think about more than a diagnosis. Through the spring of 2017, the two sent emails back and forth, had video calls, and brainstormed in Google Docs about what models might better serve journalism. Subscriptions, they decided, seemed the most promising—but not in the form of journals or magazines. “Paid newsletters” felt more familiar, personal, trustworthy—and more monetizable.

They had good reason to think it could work. Best and McKenzie were both fans of Stratechery, the newsletter by Ben Thompson, a former employee of Apple and Microsoft based in Taipei, who since 2014 had been writing about tech full-time, charging readers directly. “This guy was writing this newsletter from his bedroom in Taiwan and, as far as we know, making like a million dollars a year,” Best said. (An exaggeration, perhaps, but Thompson was earning a solid living.) They wondered why his approach, which took advantage of the internet’s strengths—a global distribution network, easy payment systems—hadn’t been replicated more widely. The Skimm and Axios had built companies around monetizing newsletters, but it wasn’t an idea widely embraced by individual journalists.

The guys devised a system of taking a 10 percent cut from subscriptions (Stripe, the credit card service that processed the fees, would take 2.9 percent, plus thirty cents per transaction), which they felt tied them to the writers. They reached out to Sethi, a developer they knew from Kik, to build out the technology. Their tagline was “We literally only make money when the writers do.” Substack’s mission, announced upon the company’s official debut, sounded more grandiose: “When it has reached maturity, the subscription-based news industry could well be much larger than the newspaper business ever was, much like the ride-hailing industry in San Francisco is bigger than the taxi industry was before Lyft and Uber,” the founders wrote. “Democratizing this subscription-based future will enable more writers to earn more money by writing about what truly matters. It puts the media’s destiny into the right hands.”

To get the future started, they recruited some contributors. The first was Bill Bishop, someone McKenzie knew from his time in Hong Kong. Bishop already ran a popular free newsletter, Sinocism, analyzing China-related news, and was thinking about going behind a paywall. He agreed to move his subscriber base—thirty thousand readers—to Substack. On launch day, in October 2017, he turned his newsletter into a six-figure business. (Bishop also became an angel investor in Substack.)

In the winter of 2018, the founders successfully applied for seed funding from Y Combinator, a company that helps startups get off the ground. By the summer of 2019, they announced that they had raised $15.3 million in Series A funding, with Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, as the lead backer. “Substack can solve the structural issues between publishers/writers and readers in a way that aligns the incentives between all of them,” Andrew Chen, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote at the time. “This is the moment the next generation of media is being built.” Chen joined Substack’s board; they signed a lease on an office in San Francisco. As more people signed up to join the Substackerati, the company garnered praise from journalists. “Substack represents a radically different alternative, in which the ‘media company’ is a service and the journalists are in charge,” Ben Smith wrote in the New York Times. A Taste Media piece, anointing newsletters as the future of food coverage, argued that Substack is “allowing voices to be heard—through simple and free publishing tools—but it also allows creators to flip the switch for monetization.” Last year, BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz wrote that “paid email newsletters can bring in real money for writers with small, dedicated subscriber bases”; this year, Kantrowitz announced that he was leaving BuzzFeed to start a Substack.

Including McKenzie, who is thirty-nine; Best, thirty-three; and Sethi, thirty-one, the team now comprises seventeen people. Since the pandemic started, they’ve let the lease on their headquarters lapse. Recently, McKenzie and Best met with me over Zoom from their respective makeshift home setups. Both wore soft-gray T-shirts, the kind that represent the day-to-night look of media company founders everywhere; Best was working on a beard. Their lives had changed a lot since the spring—not just because of the coronavirus, they explained; each of them had newborns. (“Chris and I have dueling babies; they arrived within ten days of each other,” McKenzie said.) It was also the case that the pandemic had boosted their company’s growth—in the first three months, as hundreds of journalists lost their jobs, the number of active writers on Substack doubled and revenue increased by 60 percent. In the same week in July, Substack was covered in the New York Times and the Washington Post. McKenzie told me, “There’s been a huge ‘Oh, everyone’s paying attention to Substack now’ kind of feeling.”

They continued to approach potential contributors. When I asked what, exactly, they thought made someone a promising Substack writer, Best turned to McKenzie and asked, in a jokey hush, “Do we keep the Baschez score a secret?” McKenzie laughed. They have a system, created by a former employee named Nathan Baschez, that measures a Twitter user’s engagement level—retweets, likes, replies—among their followers. This person is then assigned a score on a logarithmic scale of fire emojis. Four fire emojis is very good—Substack material. Best and McKenzie will reach out and suggest that the person try a newsletter. The four-fire-emoji method turned up Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, whose Substack, Letters from an American—political with a historical eye—is now the second-top-paid. (The most popular newsletter on Substack is The Dispatch, a conservative publication founded by Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and Toby Stock.) “We called it giving them ‘the religion,’ because it wasn’t about Let’s type into this box and make money because people will pay you,” McKenzie said, of recruits. “It was like, We think there’s going to be a cultural shift here.” Lately, it seemed like everyone was a convert.

A wandering journalist, disenchanted by an industry that was never all that equitable and is now in free fall, could, perhaps, claim control of her work.

Because newsletter creators retain control of their email list, archives, and intellectual property, Substack’s main selling point is independence—from bosses, from ad-dependent corporate media models, from the whims of tech monopolies like Google and Facebook. The founders don’t claim that Substack will “save” media—a promise that’s bound to disappoint—but they argue that their model is a core part of a better, more worker-centric and reader-friendly future for journalism. All of that was attractive to Peck, who had decided in 2019 to leave a staff job at BuzzFeed, where she had been a beauty writer covering race, identity, diversity, and intersectional representation for underrepresented audiences. She’d had a bad experience there; after a round of layoffs, she was shuffled into a content-farm role; her new manager was unsupportive. She felt like the media industry offered her few alternatives (“Where can we go, as Black journalists?” she wondered aloud), so she quit her job to figure out what might come next. Ultimately, she decided to work only for herself.

That, of course, has its downsides. A hallmark of freelance life is isolation. Peck soon found that the labor of producing a newsletter can be grueling. Because Coronavirus News for Black Folks includes outside links, it requires lots of time-intensive reading—more than three days’ worth, if she doesn’t cram. The editing, compiling, and writing requires discipline; sometimes she stays up all night to finish. Then there’s production and the rest. Peck gradually slowed her pace, sending out installments a few times per month. “I’m creating graphics on Instagram to promote it, tweeting it, doing everything,” she said. “It’s a one-woman show. That gets exhausting. I don’t put it out as frequently as I’d like to.”