Matt Gurney: Why I'm joining the Athle...wait, what's this site called? 'Substack'? What's that?
In my inaugural post, I aim to set your expectations for this place sufficiently low.
Hi, I’m Matt Gurney. You might remember me from such journalism as ... well, lots. I’m a columnist and editor at the National Post. I contribute regularly to TVO. I host a national radio program every weekday on SiriusXM's Canada Talks. I pop up in other places from time to time, too, including Maclean’s, the CBC, the Walrus, and previously, Global News. I make frequent guest appearances on radio programs and television segments across the country. (But not so much TV lately, with the whole death plague thing.)
But if you are here reading this, you probably knew that already. There is basically no other reason I can think of that would explain your being here.
I am, to put it mildly, not lacking for outlets. I am incredibly, bewilderingly blessed for options on that front. So why am I starting a Substack newsletter? Three reasons.
From time to time I am moved to write something of a more personal nature, something that really does not have any value as journalism, or something that may be of interest to the news-consuming public but isn’t really a fit for any of the places I publish or broadcast. I could probably con an editor into running it anyway (sometimes I am the editor) or just babble during my show, but sometimes it's just too much of a stretch for me to justify even to myself. Up until now I’ve simply been using Twitter threads when I want to just get something off my chest or emote. I may continue to do that, or I might do it here. (Or probably both — a longer note here and an accompanying thread, maybe.) Not sure yet. This is an experiment, I guess.
I want to make sure no one squats on my name here. A colleague of mine recently had that happen to them and had to pay a few thousand bucks to just get control of their own name back. I might not really ever use this much, but I want to make sure as hell no one else does, either. And if you’re wondering if this is really me, I will use my verified Twitter account to confirm that it is, and once I’ve done so, I'll link to it here. (Done!)
The third and final reason is that I find the notion of Substack interesting. I’ll tell you why, but that’s gonna take me a few minutes.
When I was a kid my father was involved in software. He’s a serial entrepreneur who's been involved in a lot of different industries, but in the Eighties and Nineties, when I was a wee one, he was mostly a software guy. Back then, when his tech wizards came up with a new piece of software, distribution was a major problem. Some of my earliest memories are of hanging out at his company's office, walking through a room filled with fridge-sized computers — HP 3000s, he tells me — running programs off of gigantic magnetic tape reels, each of these machines putting out enough static electricity to lift you off your feet. (I can still recall what the computer room smells like now. There's nothing quite like it.) Everything depended on these huge tapes. Selling a product meant physically transporting some magnetic tape.
Later on, there were rapid improvements, starting with various models of floppy disk and then, of course, CD-ROMs. Whatever the storage medium was, you had to design a nice package for it, put it in a box, and pay for shelf space in stores, plus all the costs of manufacturing, assembly and transport of the product.
All of these things were adding costs to the distribution of what was, after all, just computer code. Zeroes and ones. A lot of people were making a ton of money as middlemen for binary.
Let’s jump forward a few years. Now I’m a teenager, and we had just gotten our first high-speed Internet connection at home, which took our dial-up-era experience and kicked it into warp speed. These were the glory days of Napster, as some of you may recall. Teenage Matt was excited at all the songs he was downloading. But my dad was excited by the possibilities for the distribution of content. He was quick to grasp what the increasing ubiquity and speed of home internet connections was going to mean. (Beyond piracy, which he was watching unfold before his eyes as songs downloaded onto my computer at a blistering 200 kbps.)
The real game-changer, he knew, was going to be in dramatically shortening the distribution path between creators and users. It wasn't going to eliminate it, but it was going to simplify it.
That was exactly 20 years ago, almost to the weekend, I was just startled to realize. While the new content-distribution model has created new forms of middlemen, and no one would claim that the technology has been as much of a win for content creators as early optimists might have hoped, his fundamental insight was accurate. Most intellectual property now exists virtually, and can be transmitted instantly to consumers, without need of middlemen ... or where middlemen are required, the process is simplified and often automated. Think about the experience of buying an album on iTunes compared to buying a CD in a store. There's still someone between the customer and the artist, taking a piece of the action, but for the customer, the experience is vastly more convenient.
It hasn't been a total revolution. Weirdos still insist on reading books printed on dead trees. Even weirder folks listen to music on spinning vinyl circles. (I'm one of those weirdos, in fact.) But the virtualization of IP and the dramatic increase in internet bandwidth has revolutionized many industries and made many new things possible.
For those who know much about the media business, you'll see how it applies. Not long ago, getting a newspaper reporter or columnist’s work to the reader required a heap of intervening steps: typesetting, printing, distribution, delivery. Now, most of you probably just read it on your phone. The entirety of the distribution system between the reporter/editor/columnist is one frazzled, overworked and underpaid 20-something slaving away on a web desk. (Well, plus all the people who keep the internet itself running. Them, too.)
The same was largely true for magazines, and generally comparable, with obvious technical differences, for radio and TV. The problem, of course, is that it was easier to make money off of news in the before times. It's been hard (near impossible) to figure out a new economic model that will sustain large media enterprises at anything like their former scale and capability.
The crisis in journalism has been coming for years. Struggling legacy media outlets were having a hard enough time even before the pandemic. The further obliteration of the advertising market, plus the broader economic shock (which I expect to last a lot longer than many people seem able to dare consider) may well finish many of them off. Others may linger on as zombie brands, kept alive by government support, but only just barely — no politician will want to be the guy in the big chair when journalism dies, but nor are any going to have any real enthusiasm for pumping in the kind of bucks a genuine revitalization would require. I’m fine with that, actually, because I think public support for journalism, outside of some narrow parameters, causes more problems than it creates. But the only thing worse than the government doing a good job saving journalism will be it doing a middling, just-barely-sufficient job. And that's what we'll likely get.
I have no idea what to do about any of this. Literally zero. If I did, I'd have solved the problem and retired already. I have a stubborn sense of optimism about the future; I believe a new model will emerge and journalism will thrive again. But that vague notion is a long-term, far-off one. The interim period is gonna suck, and we'll probably see some people try and cobble together some ad hoc way of surviving until the new model, whatever it is, arrives. If ever.
And maybe things like Substack are going to be part of that solution. Maybe, at least for a while, people who value a certain kind of journalism are just going to need to directly pay a specific journalist, or maybe a small team of them, to produce said journalism.
With that in mind, for now, this is just an experiment. I won’t be charging a subscription fee here. I already work 60-hour (or longer) weeks, and I have no desire to set something up here where I feel obliged to produce content for people who have paid to receive it. So here’s the deal: if you subscribe here, you’ll get occasional random musings from me about this or that, probably some thoughts around my hobbies and pop-culture obsessions (Welcome, Trekkies!) and, I'm thinking, a weekly round-up of everything I published that week, in my various outlets.
Almost all of the work I do is actually behind the scenes. As an editor and senior manager at the National Post, most of my time is absorbed by generic office tasks or editing the work of others and planning future projects. So some weeks, that round-up will be pretty lean, since all my efforts will have been sunk into planning, editing, writing internal memos, and a never-ending, grinding procession of Zooms. They're relentless.
But when I do publish something under my own name, basically anywhere, I’ll aggregate it here, probably weekly. For copyright reasons I will not use this as an archive of the entire article, but I’ll give a blurb and link back to the source that actually paid me to write it.
In the extremely unlikely event that this place gathers any meaningful attention I’ll also use it to communicate with readers and listeners. I have always felt that journalists have at least some obligation to be accessible to the public, at least regarding the work. Perhaps we'll do some of that communicating here. Don’t make me regret this.
But for the meantime, yeah, that's it. Let's see what this Substack-class starship can do.
Expect the first round-up newsletter tomorrow.
— MG
mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney