Substack

How writers are reacting to Substack’s AI transparency tools “Spot the difference” by Joro Chen, Brand Designer at Substack Earlier this week, we announced a feature that allows readers to scan text published to Substack to see how much of it is estimated to be written by hand or with AI assistance. We also launched tools for publishers, including the ability to run the program— —on drafts prior to publication, disable scanning on a post-by-post basis, and add a “How I make this” statement explaining their creative process to set expectations for their readers. These features do not use publisher content, either through Substack or Pangram, to train generative AI models and are now available on web, iOS, and Android. Norms around AI use and its disclosure are unsettled. But we have made the assessment that while the use of AI isn’t necessarily a problem, a lack of transparency around it definitely is. Our aim is to help writers get credit for the work that’s theirs and help their audiences make more informed choices about what they spend their time on. Substack has long been home to brilliant writers and thinkers exploring questions about AI disclosure, making a livelihood through writing, and whether technology can replace human effort in art. , a columnist at The Economist, is highly bullish on AI’s economic upside but recoiled from AI-written prose: “We should shun AI writing even if it is perfectly bearable to read,” he wrote. Science fiction writer evangelized intention , and said that AI output can’t be art because it isn’t the product of choices. The proposed a Mohs-style scale of AI reliance, from 0 to 10, and menaced , “If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you.” Writers have methodically tested what AI can and can’t generate. ran an experiment to track if an LLM could write the parts of a novel that aren’t the prose itself. Engineer, founder, and former venture capitalist tried to measure the statistical signature of literary style, interested to see if a model could eventually learn to w...

Jonathan Wilson’s World Cup Diary We caught up with veteran British soccer writer, podcaster, and historian of the game on the eve of his sixth World Cup final. Over the past six weeks, he’s been all over the map, filing from Mexico City, Guadalajara, Houston, and Boston for The Guardian, Bloomberg, the Paris Review, and more, while bringing literary dispatches and wry analysis to his own newsletter Wilson’s World (of football) . We asked him to document the day he covered the Spain-France semifinal in Dallas and chatted with him about his Substack strategy, how he expanded his subscriber base by 40% over the course of the tournament, and his reckoning with the strange atmosphere at World Cup 2026. Your sixth world cup! How many matches did you get to this time around? Fifteen, I think. Maybe 16. I did three in Mexico City, three in Guadalajara, two in Monterrey, so that’s eight. I did four in Dallas, two in Houston, one in Boston. So 15 total! I also loved your dispatches from the games you caught along the way: watching from hotel bars, or restaurant patios, or catching the Germany-Paraguay penalty shootout at an airport Chili’s. I wasn’t even in it! I was outside the Chili’s. I was rushing through security to see the end, obviously had to make my flight, and I could see the screens. I was like, “Okay, I can just go over there and watch.” There were maybe about a dozen people there when I got there, and I got there at about 117 minutes. By the end of the penalties there were 60, 70, 80 people standing there. If you’d been selecting the most diverse group of people you could have found, you couldn’t have created a better one. There were a couple of security staff, a pilot, a couple of cleaners, a bloke in a Swiss shirt, loads of people with Mexican shirts, babies in pushchairs, old people in wheelchairs. People who clearly knew exactly what was going on, people who said, “I don’t understand this. What happens next?” It was the great World Cup moment of everybody coming together to watch this exciti...

New on Substack: Subscriber Perks, saved Notes, scheduled Chats, MCP, redesigned podcast player, and more Whether you’re spending your Substack summer tinkering with your existing newsletter or podcast or launching your first one, we’re shipping features that make it easier to publish, customize, and distribute your work, and engage with your audience. We look forward to hearing what’s most useful and what you want more of. Here’s the latest. Paid subscriber Perks Subscriber Perks are a new feature that lets you give your paid audience something extra beyond traditional paywalled content, like discount codes, downloadable resources, or invites to live sessions. Perks you create will appear under the new “Perks” tab on your publication. It’s another way to thank the paid subscribers who support your work and encourage others to upgrade. This is available to publishers who have payments enabled. Here are some perks publishers are already offering their paid subscribers: ’s U.S. shopping guide ’s curated list of people to meet at SXSW London ’s six-day meal plan [From left] Perks available for paid subscribers of Anna Eleri Hart , I Like Networking , and Caroline Chambers Learn more about subscriber perks in our Help Center . Saved Notes You can now save Notes on iOS and Android directly in the Substack app. Saved Notes live in your Substack profile. Just click on the ⋯ in the top right corner to access them. This dedicated space for saved Notes within your profile is like your curated reading list, or as put it , the place to revisit a Note that’s an “absolute gem.” Scheduled Chats You can now schedule Chat threads just like you schedule Notes and posts. Scheduling chats is a great way to build community by connecting regularly with your audience between posts. Schedule a chat by going to the Chat tab, clicking the orange button to start a new Chat thread, and selecting “Schedule” in the thread settings Shea Serrano , who writes Good Movie , scheduling a Chat thread Polls You can now post polls to Substack Notes. Polls are another way to continue the conversation with you...

Who’s with W. Kamau Bell? has lived many different lives as a host and comedian: one of them centered on the singular conviction that Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period , another in service of an institution (the ACLU’s At Liberty ), another at the helm of several documentaries and seven seasons anchoring CNN’s prime-time Sunday night slot with his show United Shades of America . He’s now launched Who’s With Me? , a new podcast based on and distributed through his Substack publication of the same name, which he’s grown from an email list of 20,000 to nearly 140,000 subscribers since joining the platform in 2024. The show is not another celebrity podcast, he says, but features a guest list of people he can actually text to invite on: Delroy Lindo, Robert Reich, Ted Danson, Daveed Diggs, Misty Copeland, and more. Made in partnership with Malcom Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries, it’s also a venture he’s owned from day one. We sat down with Kamau to find out how season one is going, ask him about his “white whale” guest, and talk about what it means to own his own work in an industry that’s still trying to decide who it’s for. You kicked off episode one of the new show by saying, “This is me investing in myself and trying to bet on myself, because the industry is not betting on people like me anymore.” What did you mean by that? I had one of the great runs in the history of show business. I had seven seasons of a television show at CNN with United Shades of America. That puts me in the showbiz hall of fame. I sort of was aware as it was happening that this was rarefied air that I was in. And then when the show went away, I thought I had plans for my next chapter with another show like that, but the industry sort of turned on those shows. After the murder of George Floyd, there was all this clamor in the industry for “We need to talk to more Black creators and empower them.” In one of those conversations, I got my documentary, 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed. That came out of a co...

Introducing country leaderboards and post translations Illustration credit: Joro Chen, Brand Designer at Substack It can be hard to put your finger on what makes a Substack get-together so memorable. The depth of conversation? For sure. The variety of people in one space? Absolutely. But mainly I think it’s the fact that Substack writers and creators have the same shared notion that culture thrives when everyone is allowed to put their ideas out into the world. This past month, we’ve seen this in action as Substack events popped off around the globe, bringing communities of otherwise unconnected creatives together in person. Hundreds of creators came together for our annual U.K. bestsellers drinks in London. In Paris, Substack’s burgeoning French scene gathered for an evening of drinks and conversation. In Madrid, Substack writers met for a one-of-a-kind writing workshop, complete with typewriters, to inspire their next posts. More and more, publishers are organizing their own meetups for their communities all over the world. Bringing writers together, no matter where they live, is something we have always set out to do here at Substack. In April, we introduced the ability to translate all short-form content on Substack—one of our most-requested features—in order to bring creators closer to their global communities. Today we’re going one step further, announcing that longer-form posts on Substack can now be translated from English into 15 different languages, and from 100 different languages into English . This means language no longer has to be a barrier for the work you publish. We’re also announcing new country leaderboards for users based in the U.K. , France , Italy , the Netherlands , and Spain , which are among the five fastest-growing markets outside the U.S. These leaderboards offer a valuable way for audiences to find both established bestsellers and up-and-coming publications in their countries, and we are excited about the opportunities this will bring for these publishers. (If you don’t see your country lis...

Open Tab: Hunter Harris is the creator of , the twice-weekly Substack newsletter where she takes a forensic lens to our culture’s obsessions and her own. She says she and her audience of nearly 200,000 subscribers share the same “disease”—insatiability—and that they’re bonded by a specific tunnel vision: her willingness to write a dozen pieces about A Star Is Born or spend time tracking down the marriage license of Taylor Swift’s publicist, if that’s what curiosity demands. is part cultural criticism, part late-night group chat, and an ongoing argument for why pop culture matters. Her chat , where paid subscribers debrief everything from season premieres to their own lives, has become one of the most devoted, lore-dense places on the internet and serves as a master class in how to turn an audience into a social world. Harris grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she watched melodramas with her aunt, crime capers with her dad, and, at 12, wrote a letter to the local film critic disputing his review of The Other Boleyn Girl. In this season finale of Open Tab, she sat down with Substack’s head of new media, , to talk about studying journalism (and thinking she might break the next Watergate), her four years at New York magazine’s Vulture, and launching on Substack in 2020. They met at Trees Lounge inside the Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, one of Harris’s home theaters, sipped tequila gimlets, and filled in the rest. Hanne: So you have subscription revenue as your core, but you also have a podcast, you do TV writing, you still do some freelance for legacy media, and you do some brand stuff. How do you think about the whole mixed-revenue stream, the business of Hung Up? Hunter: The newsletter is my job. Everything else feels like something fun, something I feel curious about. But I do feel very seriously that people who read the newsletter are customers, and I am fulfilling my contract with them. I just think it’s the most disrespectful thing in the world to be like, “Okay, maybe it...

A business model that works for creators Illustration credit: Joro Chen, Brand Designer at Substack Today we’re introducing the next phase of Substack’s native sponsorships program, with an inaugural cohort of flagship partners who are collectively investing millions of dollars into creators on Substack. If you are a Substack bestseller who is interested in participating and shaping the program, you can publish your Creator Kit now. The deal most of the internet offers creators goes something like this: We’ll give you reach if you give us your audience. Perform for the algorithm. Hope for a minority share of a platform’s own revenue, or figure out the money part yourself. Build your following on our platform, under our rules, subject to our priorities—and if any of that changes, good luck. Most creators accept this deal because they feel like they have no choice. The platforms are where the audiences are. And over time, the system shapes you. You learn to make things the algorithm rewards instead of things you believe in. Substack is built on a different theory: Give publishers a direct connection to the people who believe in them. Let people pay for the work they value. We know that model works. Now more than 100,000 publishers make money on Substack through the subscription model. The top 10 collectively make more than $100 million a year, while tens of millions of subscribers across the network give creators the opportunity to build both audience and business in one place. At the same time, some of the most successful creators have been finding ways to expand their business and better serve their community by partnering with organizations that help them offer more perks, invest more deeply in their editorial, and introduce new features for subscribers. ’s sponsored letter with Hinge ranked as ’s fourth-most-engaged letter in 2024. She wrote about this herself that year: advertisements on Feed Me, done right, are not compromising her audience-first model. built his own Product Pass —a collection of compl...

Open Tab: Lachlan Cartwright In this week’s Open Tab, Australian-born, New York–based muckraker Lachlan Cartwright sat down with Substack co-founder to walk through two decades covering media, money, and power—from The Sun and the New York Post to executive editor of the National Enquirer, where he went from breaking news to becoming an anonymous source in one of the biggest political scandals of the decade. His New York Times Magazine cover story on the catch-and-kill operation that protected Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein took a year to write and earned him multimillion-dollar legal threats in the process. These days he runs Breaker , the twice-weekly media newsletter and podcast he founded after years of people telling him to strike out on his own—it’s tabloid flair paired with the standards of the broadsheets and, as he puts it, a healthy appetite for fun. Hamish: You’re a newshound, a scoop-getter, a news-breaker, and a tabloid journalist of sorts. Lachlan: Allegedly. Hamish: Cut from the cloth of an old-school type of reporter. And that’s kind of special in today’s world, because lots of people are just random opinionators and mouthers-off. Lachlan: I’m an old-school newshound. Some would say a muckraker. I spend a lot of time meeting and greeting and ingratiating and sourcing. I always say I’m only as good as my sources, and that’s how I get scoops—being out and about, going out into the world and finding out new information. And then coming back, standing it up, tapping it up. And as we would say, putting it in the paper, which is now a newsletter. Hamish: You were the number two editor at the National Enquirer, and through your work there you discovered that they were essentially paying for stories so that they could kill those stories on behalf of some powerful figures: Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein. Lachlan: That’s correct. Hamish: Tell me, what was it like to write that story and have it out in the world? Because it was complicated, and it involved so much personal stuff and was...

Open Tab: Joanna Coles has spent her formidable career at the center of media: London’s Fleet Street in the ’80s, New York magazine, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and eventually the chief content officer role overseeing Hearst’s entire global magazine portfolio. She knows intimately what legacy media organizations have looked like at every stage of their life cycle and spent years “managing decline” from the inside. Two years ago, as Chief Creative and Content Officer, she helped take over and bring it to Substack, where it now operates a suite of newsletters and podcasts. She also writes , her own publication covering politics and power and where she co-hosts and sends out The Daily Beast Podcast to an audience of over 70,000 subscribers. Joanna invited us for a cup of tea and a slice of cake at , a West Village institution that has been importing British calm to Manhattan for over 30 years. There, she and Substack’s head of new media, , talked about the golden age of the glossy mag, the two questions Cosmo readers have never stopped asking, and what life looks like on the other side of the old media order. Hanne: For somebody growing up today in journalism school who might not know what old newsrooms were like, what was the culture? Joanna: Well, I mean, first of all, they were incredibly noisy because you had typewriters. And I am not exaggerating when I say that you would get seven pieces of paper, seven pieces of carbon paper. You would put it into the typewriter, and you would have to think very carefully about what you wanted to say, because if you made a mistake, you had to either rip the whole thing out and start all over again or you had to correct it seven times. And you would have what was called Tipp-Ex whiteout, where you had to cross it out. So there was more planning ahead of what you were going to write. It was fantastically noisy. Then computers came in, and half the newsroom, largely men, would say, “Well, I’m not going to use a computer. That’s ridiculous. There’s nothin...

Introducing Reply Rules Reply Rules set by Le Grove , Entertaining with Beth , Sherry Ning , and Ministry of Pop Culture . Since its founding, Substack has sought to create the best possible conditions for cultures of many varieties to flourish online. Doing so often involves difficult trade-offs, but on top of our core model—where we only earn when writers, artists, journalists, musicians, and so on earn—we’ve managed to chart a distinctive course relative to other platforms. We hope that people, their work, and the communities that form around it all can be more real here than has historically been possible elsewhere, where massive scales and advertising models seem to drain reality even from good-faith creators over time. A few months ago, we shared this vision for what Substack can be: a place where you can build your own corner of the internet . That means your branding, your community, and your rules, without sacrificing the network that helps you grow. Today, we’re excited to announce the next feature in that effort, which we think will make it possible for even more people to be fully themselves and at home on Substack. We call it Reply Rules , and it combines a couple of elements: Anyone can now set their own Reply Rules, which will appear to anyone replying to them: in comments on their posts, in replies to their Notes, or in Chat. There is now a system that learns every time you hide a reply and preemptively hides replies it thinks you would hide yourself (you can always see these and un-hide them, which the system will also learn from). Soon, this system will read your Reply Rules when you set them and use them as guidance for its actions, in addition to what it sees you do. Our hope is that it gives you more time to focus on what matters: creating the work that encourages people to stop by your corner of the internet in the first place. Learn how to set up your Reply Rules here . Your house, your rules It will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Substack’s arc over ...

The independent writer’s advantage in the age of AI publishes jasmi.news , where she interviews AI researchers, eavesdrops at San Francisco house parties, and reports what she calls “an anthropology of disruption”—on-the-ground dispatches from how frontier technology is changing culture. At Substack’s recent Once and Future Media Forum, Jasmine shared her perspective on the comparative advantages she and other independent writers and creators hold in the age of AI: what skills are gaining value, which are losing it, and where economies of attention are going as a result. She’s the first to acknowledge that writers and creators hold a wide range of views—concerns, optimism, fears, curiosity — about what AI means for their work. But here she makes the case for why writers are better positioned than they might think, and what they can do to exercise that advantage whether they choose to use AI or not. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of her talk. When economists debate the future of work, they often ask the question: what will humans’ comparative advantage be? I think the key to understanding what the future of work looks like is not, How can humans race against the machine, how can we generate slop faster than the machines can generate slop? but rather, What are the human strengths, and how can we understand what skills are going to go down in value now that AI has made them commoditized, versus what skills are going to go up in value because they are still scarce and because the machines simply aren’t very good at them yet? I’m going to introduce four ideas, or provocations, that have shaped the way that I think about AI and my own media career. One: The value of summary will go down, and the value of secrets will go up. Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public. The things that people have not said, things in whisper networks, the tacit knowledge, the open secrets that have never been put in the public domain—the journalist manages to pluck them out and make them public. When yo...

Open Tab: Kevin Kelly We sat down with writer, editor, photographer, and futurist at the Interval at Long Now in San Francisco’s Fort Mason. Part cocktail bar, part science-centric museum to the future, the Interval houses an eight-foot-tall model of the solar system, artwork by the musician Brian Eno, and prototypes for the Long Now Foundation’s most ambitious project: a clock being built inside a West Texas mountain, designed to keep time without intervention for 10,000 years. Kevin serves on the board of the organization, which believes that a civilization seriously anticipating a long future would think and build very differently. Kelly is also the founding executive editor of Wired, where he spent the better part of the 1990s helping people understand technology as culture. Before that, he was a key editor and publisher at the Whole Earth Review and a central figure at the Whole Earth Catalog, the legendary tools-and-ideas resource that shaped a generation of independent builders and thinkers from the late 1960s through the 1980s. He is the originator of the “1,000 true fans” theory—the idea that a creator with direct access to their audience needs only 1,000 people willing to buy anything they make to sustain a living—one of the most practically influential ideas in independent media. In his conversation with Substack’s head of new media, Hanne Winarsky, he talks about his journey through tech and media and the subjects he writes about for his Substack audience at his newsletter, : taking a prototyping approach to life, why optimism is a daily practice, and some guesses for where we’re headed next. Hanne: There was no web at the very launch of Wired? Kevin: The web happened within a year or so of Wired. The first couple of years we were working on it, it was going to be a paper magazine with an online presence. So we started Wired Digital, which was actually in a separate building, and we developed a whole bunch of editors and people, and they were inventing what the media would be...

My Internet: Kate Lindsay Twice a month, internet-culture publication logs on with someone extremely online and asks them nearly the same set of questions: What memes are making you laugh? Where do you get your news? Do you text people voice notes? The series is called My Internet, and it’s one of several recurring formats that founders and have built since being laid off and starting their newsletter in 2021. Over the years, they’ve expanded it into a multi-vertical operation, with the free interview series drawing readers in and paid tiers that unlock essays, a Friday media gossip column, and a video series. Kate told us Embedded’s growth has been “a lesson in consistency”: nearly five years of publishing almost every week, building an audience entirely their own. Kate has made her career in part out of naming what the internet is doing, contributing to our vernacular and comments sections phrases like “millennial pause” (first seen on Embedded ) and “ rawdogging .” She’s been cited as an expert by the BBC and CBC, and co-hosts ICYMI , Slate’s podcast about internet culture. Today we flip the script on one of the internet’s shrewdest observers, asking Kate to sit for her own Embedded Q&A and talk about the business she’s built around the format. EMBEDDED Founded: 2021 Format: Twice-weekly newsletter Verticals: My Internet , a recurring Q&A series about the online habits of interesting people; media_gossip , a Friday sub-newsletter covering the media industry; Screen Time Diaries , a video series documenting what’s happening across Kate’s screens in real time Tiers: Free (creator interviews, My Internet Q&As), Paid—$5/month or $50/year (Monday essays, Friday media_gossip edition), Founding Member—$75/year (all of the above, plus your name inscribed in the “Hall of Embeddeds”) What’s been your best-performing newsletter post? Why do you think it hit? It’s never the ones you expect, but this one is far and away Embedded’s most popular post, so much so that it was syndicated and translated int...

Open Tab: Ashlee Vance In episode 3 of Open Tab, Substack co-founder shared a few rounds with filmmaker and tech journalist at Fred’s Place, a longtime neighborhood dive in Mountain View just minutes from where the technology that gave Silicon Valley its name was born. After two decades covering tech for major publications, Ashlee circled the globe for Hello World, Bloomberg’s travel-tech documentary series exploring “the freshest, weirdest tech creations” and introducing viewers to “the beautiful freaks behind them.” That same pull toward tech’s biggest risk-takers also led him to write a bestselling biography of Elon Musk, based on months of interviews and unusually direct access—a profile Musk first praised as “95% accurate” before turning on it at publication. With , the media company he founded and now runs on Substack, Ashlee is still writing, reporting, and making films, but with his own shop and team. He says his work gives audiences a window into where the world is going six or seven years before the rest of the culture catches up. In his conversation with Hamish, he talks about what it actually takes to get close to a subject, why he walked away from what he called the best job in media, and the stories and formats he’s building as the bet seems to be paying off. CORE MEMORY Started: 2025 Subscribers: Thousands of paid (orange checkmark bestseller) Format: Newsletter, podcast, video series, documentary films Team: A crew of writers, producers, editors, and a social media team, led by Ashlee alongside a COO, a chief creative officer, and an operations lead Extensions and verticals: Multiple writers producing regular newsletter sends across beats; podcast ; merch ; feature documentary projects in production, including an upcoming Neuralink documentary produced and self-funded through the company Hamish: Why are we here at Fred’s Place in Mountain View? Ashlee: I spent most of my early 20s in the Tenderloin [in San Francisco] bonding with dive bars. It was part of my lifestyle. Fre...

Scott Galloway had the audience. Here’s what he came for. is a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, a serial entrepreneur, and, for the past decade, a writer, podcaster and media founder. No Mercy / No Malice , the weekly newsletter he started as a testing ground for book chapters, now goes out to more than 400,000 subscribers, and his media business, , generates roughly $20 million a year in podcast revenue across his portfolio. His reach among the 25-to-54 demographic, he told us, beats the most-watched shows on CNBC. No Mercy No Malice lived for most of its life passed around a series of email platforms that, as his team describes it, were built for enterprise marketing departments. For the year and a half before they came to Substack, another newsletter, Prof G Markets , was running on beehiiv. In March, the team made the decision to consolidate everything under one roof, bringing a full portfolio of newsletters, video, livestreams, and new subscriber-only content to Substack. In the two months since, they’ve launched three new newsletters and are preparing to debut The Week, a Friday roundup across the Prof G universe. Starting May 27, of Raging Moderates will be co-hosting a weekly livestream with of , their first Substack-exclusive show. “For the first time,” his team told us, “we’re supported by a platform purpose-built for content creators.” We sat down with Galloway after his first two months on the platform to hear what this subscription revenue has unlocked for him and why he projects that Prof G Media will reach $1 million in ARR on Substack by the end of the year. He was characteristically direct about where media is going and about what it actually costs creators to build on platforms that hold the leverage—where your margin, as he puts it, is their opportunity. He is also honest about what’s hard, what he hasn’t figured out yet, and why he thinks the real test is still ahead. You’ve been publishing the first of your weekly newsletters, No Mercy / No Malice, for what will be 10 years this ...

Open Tab: Esther Perel The psychotherapy room is, by design, one of the most private spaces in human life, but has devoted much of her career to opening the door. Addressing relationships, cross-cultural psychology, and the contours of belonging, she brought therapeutic ideas out into the world through a body of work that spans talks, books, and her hit podcast Where Should We Begin? , which has reached millions of listeners across nearly a decade. In her Substack publication , she says she’s found a gathering place for it all: “I always talk about how I wanted to bring the therapeutic ideas into the public square,” she told us. “Now I want to create a public square.” On the day of the 20th anniversary re-release of her book Mating in Captivity , a cultural touchstone on the topic of desire, we’re sharing a conversation between Esther and , Substack’s head of new media, recorded at Temple Bar in SoHo, New York. In this second episode of Open Tab, Esther discusses how she hires and has built her businesses, how work has replaced religion as a source of meaning, whether AI can give good therapy, and how she’s made it her life’s work to re-create the proverbial village online. ENTRE NOUS Founded: October 2025 Format: Weekly newsletter and podcast Subscribers: Thousands of paid (orange checkmark bestseller) Extensions and verticals: Podcast Where Should We Begin? , featuring real, anonymous therapy sessions, with episode-specific chats and debriefs for paid subscribers. Exclusive behind-the-scenes conversations, personal reflections, and essays. Live virtual events, including “Ask Me Anything” sessions for top-tier members. Paid tiers: Free (monthly letters, weekly podcast episodes, select livestreams), Paid — $9/month or $90/year (ad-free listening, full chat and commenting access, bonus content), Salon Community — $200/year (all of the above, plus live AMAs with Esther a few times a year) Hanne: You talk a lot in your work about security and desire and the balance between them—in families, ...

Open Tab: Emily Sundberg For our inaugural episode of Open Tab, we knew we wanted to speak with . Emily’s the founder and daily writer of , a business, tech, and culture newsletter that’s been described as “ must-read (and much-read) .” She publishes almost every weekday— something like 250 sends a year—covering everything from DTC darlings and media industry churn to New York hospitality and new world etiquette. In the process, she has been profiled by the New York Times and Air Mail , becoming known as a “ media it girl ” and “ one of the most talked-about writers in business and culture journalism .” Emily has worked in media and tech but built her current audience of over 10,000 paid subscribers natively on Substack, post by post. She told us she sees Feed Me as a studio, with extensions like a podcast, job board, and thriving subscriber comments section where she’s “never scared that anything bad is happening.” Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie sat down with Emily at Old Town Bar in Manhattan’s Flatiron district to talk about building her independent media business from scratch and the glimmers of hope she sees for media on Substack and beyond. Location: Old Town Bar, Flatiron, NYC. Order: 1 Guinness each FEED ME Founded: 2021 Format: Daily newsletter Subscribers: 10,000+ paid (purple checkmark bestseller) Extensions and verticals: Merch, events, podcast Expense Account (hosted by ). Interview series Guest Lecture (where her paid subscribers have submitted questions for everyone from to ). Recent West Coast and London editions of the newsletter, a job board , and more. Conversation Excerpts Hamish: A lot of Feed Me is about money, power, and status. How does that influence how you do [your] job? Emily: Well, I’ve had a lot of jobs, which has opened me up to a lot of different networks of people. So I’m not coming out of journalism school and writing about the DTC world, or about the hospitality world, or about newsrooms that I’ve never been in. I’ve worked in newsrooms, I’ve worked i...

Introducing Open Tab Most of what we hear from media insiders is a story of decline: collapsing economics, algorithmic chaos, layoffs, and LLMs nipping at journalists’ heels. But a new class of independent media founders is creating powerful businesses around their own work and direct relationships with readers, listeners, and viewers—highly-profitable, multi-format, and built without first raising millions of dollars or a complex infrastructure stack. They’re finding ways to make creative livelihoods that don’t depend on the goodwill of a platform or a print masthead. Open Tab is a new interview series hosted by Substack co-founder and Head of New Media , who sit down with a different independent media founder each week to ask them how they did it. Every episode of the show is filmed at a neighborhood bar, restaurant, or café where the guest likes to spend their time. And in each conversation, Hamish or Hanne joins with, “I’ll have what you’re having.” Episode one comes out tomorrow, May 7. The guests are writers, editors, and creators who have built thriving media businesses and communities from the ground up. Among them: a techno-optimist with a thousand-year view, and a relationship therapist with a warning about AI’s impacts tomorrow. A journalist who wrote the definitive book on Elon Musk—before, he says, Elon tried to buy up every copy. A tabloid insider who spent years protecting a secret source and then became a whistleblower himself. Internet natives and legacy media icons who have reported on power and celebrity from up close. Some built their audience entirely from scratch; others arrived with a career’s body of work and found a home for it here. We kept returning to the unvarnished reality of building something on your own: the appetite for risk, the rewards of independence, and what it means to do this in a time when a single person with a point of view can rival—and often exceed—the reach of the most storied media institutions. New episodes of the show will drop weekly th...

Three models for building community for your podcast Great podcasts have loyal communities: the people who show up for every episode drop, create a dedicated group chat with their friends, or scour the internet looking for takes. We’ve worked directly with hundreds of podcast creators to build tools that allow them to own and grow these communities on Substack—whether or not they’re using the platform as a primary hub for distribution. An email list of people who’ve opted in to hear from you is an asset that doesn’t disappear when a recommendation algorithm changes, a deal expires, or you want to try something new. Episodes go directly to your subscribers’ inboxes and can be distributed to other podcast platforms via RSS, and you can record natively—including with remote guests—using Substack Recording Studio . Chat functions like a group chat for your listeners, a dedicated place for your audience to talk to each other and to you between episodes. Live video lets you engage, react, or connect in real time. Notes , Substack’s short-form feed, is where new listeners find you: post a clip, a quick thought, or a moment from a recent episode, and it surfaces to people who aren’t subscribed yet. The Substack network drives more than 50% of all subscriptions on the platform, meaning growth is built in when you post. In partnership with the Signal Awards , we recently spoke with , a host of , and from about how they use Substack to host their shows, distribute episodes, and build community through Chat, Notes, and more. “We’ll throw on the Substack live chat feature on a Saturday and interact with our people there,” Richard said about using Chat on game days. “It helps to know that we’re being supported by like-minded community.” Once started building its community, Biz said, it took on a life of its own: “The community is self-sustaining. People do meetups and stuff all the time that have nothing to do with us. That’s one of the beautiful things about making something like this—it takes on its own life without you.” There a...

Inside Lena Dunham’s Substack press tour For most of the past decade, has been offline: no Instagram, no scrolling, with a trusted collaborator managing her digital presence. Last year, she and that collaborator—strategist —decided to make an exception, and Lena got her Substack login. “It was like when I graduated from rehab,” Lena told us. “Very adult.” Since then, Lena’s become increasingly active on , writing about everything from reading lists to her favorite Etsy finds to how she organizes her Notes app. Now she’s promoting her new memoir, Famesick , from bed, both at home and onstage, where she’s been hosting a kind of roving variety show from under the covers—and all over Substack. In the days leading up to the memoir’s release, Lena made guest appearances on publications across the platform, an online book tour that let her collaborate with some of her favorite writers. Each piece was written to fit its home: a ’90s fashion nostalgia trip for , a Q&A on body image and rehab for , a meditation on moviegoing for . Writer of After School took note: “I can’t recall a single book launch that has utilized the Substack platform so handily.” We talked with Lena and Dolly about “going where it’s warm,” why they promoted Famesick sideways rather than head-on, and what Dolly would do differently next time. You’ve been in bed with everyone from the NYT to in the last few weeks. How’s the press tour going? Lena: It’s been a ball! Last time I really did this level of public anything was the last season of Girls (and if you read Famesick you’ll see that I wasn’t really in the place to, uh, enjoy it). Since then I’ve been largely behind the scenes as a writer and director, which means you can rely on your cast to hold it down, press-wise. I have definitely pushed myself out of the little comfort zone I’ve found in recent years, but that’s because, as all the many authors of Substack know, when it comes to a book, there’s only you. So I realized I was going to have to find a way to do promotion and a tour that did...

The global ideas exchange Who changed your life today? Who stretched your way of seeing the universe? Who challenged you to think deeper about the culture around you, or to question the state of the political world? Who introduced you to a new song, a brand-new way of cooking, or even a new rose to plant in your garden? If you’ve been on Substack for a while, my hope is you’ve found these people here. Because that’s always been part of Substack’s mission: to make good on the internet’s promise as a place for the universal exchange of knowledge and ideas. We want to make it easier for you to stumble upon ideas that not only enrich your life but that challenge your thoughts and sharpen your thinking. Today, we’re cracking open the world of ideas even further as we introduce new translation features, starting with the ability to translate Notes written in English into 15 languages, or into English from over 100 languages. That means you can now read and engage with writers and creators anywhere from Trondheim to Tokyo. What’s more, in the coming weeks, we’ll also be adding translation to posts, meaning you can take a deeper dive into your favorite writers’ work, wherever they are across the globe. For writers, this will open the world to your work. The post you publish in English will be able to find readers in Istanbul. The newsletter you write in Japanese can build an audience in Buenos Aires. A poet in Lisbon and a food writer in Marseille are no longer separated from each other—or from the readers who would love their work—by the language they happen to write their Notes in. The addressable readership for every writer will have grown meaningfully larger. Because ideas should not be limited to geography or thwarted by language. Good, smart, interesting ideas should be allowed to flourish wherever there is a willing mind to engage. I’ve had the chance to preview these features, and the writers I’ve discovered have already expanded my horizons. Just this weekend, I stumbled upon a discussion a...

New on Substack: Post templates, Notes scheduling, drop caps, and more This month, we’re shipping a range of updates that give you more control over your publishing workflow—from scheduling Notes in advance to new live video tools, post templates, and design details that make your publication feel unmistakably yours. Here’s what’s new. Post templates You can now create and save templates for longform posts, directly within the post editor. If your workflow includes recurring elements like calls to action, disclaimers, section structures, sponsorship placements, or code blocks, you can save them once and reuse them in new drafts instantly. This removes repetitive setup work and helps you stay consistent without starting from scratch each time. Build your format once, and reuse it whenever you need it. Adding a saved call to action using the template feature Learn more about using post templates in our Help Center . Drop caps Enable a drop cap—the large, stylized first letter that opens a piece of writing—for your Substack publication. You can turn this on in the Website Editor in your publication settings. From there, click “Posts,” toggle on “Drop caps,” and click “Save.” Visible on web, drop caps are a small detail that can give your writing a more considered, editorial feel. A drop cap, as seen on Racket News Learn more about adding a drop cap to your post in our Help Center . Live video: more control over how you stream and manage events We’ve expanded Substack Live with new tools for publications running regular video programming: Choose where you stream: You can now decide which publication to go live from each time you stream, instead of being limited to your primary publication. This is available across iOS, Android, and web. From the new live video management dashboard page on desktop, you can now: Schedule on behalf of a host. Contributors and admins can now schedule a livestream for another creator on your publication. Edit scheduled streams. You can now update the title, timing, host, and notification settings for any schedu...

How to migrate your newsletter to Substack Why move to Substack? Whether you’re a solo writer, a video podcaster, or a full newsroom, Substack brings everything you need into one place, without requiring technical experience or stitching together separate tools. It’s free to start, and when you choose to turn on paid subscriptions, you keep 90% of what you earn. Because Substack only makes money when you do, our incentives are directly aligned with yours. When you publish here, you’re also reaching beyond the subscribers you already have. The Substack network drives more than 50% of all subscriptions on the platform, from millions of active users discovering posts every day—so you can gain subscribers and income simply by publishing on Substack. “I had my Beehiiv newsletter for six months, with no organic growth through that platform … the more I’ve committed my time to Substack, the more compounding returns I’ve seen.” — , who switched from Beehiiv, as told to Digiday Substack is designed to meet you where you are: Writers and journalists: Build a direct relationship with readers who pay you for your work. Podcasters and video creators: Host natively, go live, and publish automatically to Substack, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Offer premium episodes to paid subscribers. Media companies: Run a full newsroom with multiple writers, sections, and podcasts. Substack handles payments, distribution, and subscriber management. Experts and educators: Teach what you know and share your work on your own terms, with your audience paying you directly because they value it. We’ve made it easy to bring your content, audience, and payment relationships with you to Substack. This guide walks you through everything you need to get set up on Substack, so you can take advantage of the network and tools to build a stronger connection with your community. Step 1: Set up your publication When you first set up your Substack, you’ll be prompted to choose a publication name, URL, and one-line description. You can always come back an...

Introducing the Substack Recording Studio Today, we’re launching the Substack Recording Studio, a built-in studio that makes it easier than ever to pre-record and publish a show on Substack. Substack Studio, currently available on desktop only, lets you record a solo video or a conversation with up to two guests and publish it when you’re ready, with auto-generated clips and thumbnails included. Until now, creating video on Substack meant going live , or stitching together a separate stack of tools: a recording platform, a way to create and distribute clips, and something to design a thumbnail. Substack Studio brings all of those tools into one place. And as with live video, anything you share is automatically distributed through the Substack network—in the mobile app, on the web, and on the big screen with Substack TV . Here’s what’s new: Recording Studio Record a conversation without going live and publish it when you’re ready. On desktop, simply click the Recording Studio button under “Create.”​​ You can invite up to two guests, who can join from desktop or the Substack mobile apps. After they accept your invite, they’ll automatically join the preview room, and you can start recording. Once you’re done, you’ll get the same auto-generated clips and thumbnails you’d get from a live video. of recently used Substack Studio to sit down with ’s for a deep dive into the trends reshaping the snack industry—recording, publishing, and clipping the entire episode using just Substack tools. Publication branding Hosts can now add a publication logo or wordmark directly into any show they record on Substack, whether it’s live or in the Studio. You can adjust it to appear in the top left, top right, or bottom left of the frame, and can also upload a custom asset if you want to add something specific to a show. This is the first step toward giving every show on Substack its own distinct look and feel. Publisher recently added her Red Letter logo to an episode with congressional reporter . Screen sharing Hosts and co-hos...

New on Substack: draft Notes, hide revenue stats, pin multiple posts, and more Today, we’re introducing a series of updates across Notes, your dashboard, live video, and your feed. These updates make it easier to draft, manage, and publish your work on Substack. Save Notes as drafts You can now save Notes as drafts on web and iOS, with Android coming this week. If you start writing a Note and hit cancel, you’ll have the option to save it instead. When you return to the composer, you’ll find your saved Notes in a new Drafts tab. Take Your Time publisher Dianna Cohen saves a draft of one of her Notes. This makes it easier to capture ideas as they come to you, refine them over time, and publish when you’re ready. Learn more about drafting and publishing Notes in our Help Center . Pin multiple posts to your homepage You can now pin multiple posts to your homepage to control what visitors see first. Pinning a post to the homepage of publication Silver Bulletin . To pin a post: Tap the pencil icon on your homepage Search for the post you want to feature Select it to pin Learn more about customizing your homepage in our Help Center . Export your publisher stats as a CSV file Publisher stats are now exportable as a CSV file, directly from your dashboard. Exports reflect whatever filters and views you’re currently using, so you can pull the exact data you need. That might mean analyzing audience growth or tracking traffic trends over time, all in a format you can work with offline. To export, select the time range you’d like to analyze in your publication dashboard, then click “Download CSV” from the menu. Center, right align, or justify your text You can now center, right align, or justify text in your posts from the web editor toolbar, giving you more control over how your writing looks on the page. Hide revenue and subscriber counts If you’d prefer not to see revenue and subscriber counts on your dashboard, you can now hide them. This lets you keep those metrics out of view while you focus on your work. You can toggle this setting on or off in your ...