The Trade-Off with Subscriber-Centric Journalism

I write a Substack newsletter called The Art of Finding Work, offering pragmatic job search advice which currently has over 23,500 subscribers; therefore, I have a vested interest in the monetization of content provided via a subscription-based model and why Substack’s current street-level ads announcing “Media isn’t dead. It’s on Substack.” immediately caught my attention.

Substack’s appeal isn’t just about its business model but also about the empowerment it provides to journalists and content creators. It’s a platform, one of many, that allows journalists and content creators to own our content and revenue. For the past three years, Substack has been at the forefront of a wave of prominent journalists leaving traditional news outlets, such as CNN and The Washington Post, to pursue independent journalism. This trend is inspiring, attracting names like Jim Acosta, CNN’s former chief White House correspondent, and Bari Weiss, editor of The Free Press. 

Substack’s appeal, along with comparable platforms such as Beehiiv, Ghost and Medium, lies in its ability to empower journalists to own their content and revenue. Journalists are increasingly posting their work on platforms that enable them to bypass traditional media, establish direct relationships with their audiences, and earn income through subscriptions.

While journalism, in its ever-changing form, is rapidly escaping the clutches of advertisers, journalists are unwittingly handing revenue control to something more insidious. The evangelists of subscription models are selling the narrative that audience-funded journalism represents a democratic evolution, and the big “Hurray!” is that corporate strings are no longer pulling the coverage, just the people funding the press. In my opinion, this guise conceals a subtle risk that might compromise the integrity of journalism itself.

Previously, threats to editorial independence were easily identifiable: political owners, advertisers, and partisan funders. Now, the threat is analytics and performance metrics:

• Churn signals
• Click rates
• A/B headlines (comparing two versions of a headline)
• Predictive modelling
• Emotional engagement heatmaps

At first glance, these tools appear helpful for guiding editorial decisions. Over time, however, they begin to replace genuine judgment with data-driven directives.

Our online content is dictated by algorithms that don’t reward courage or the truth, the algorithms reward:

• Outrage over nuance
• Emotion over evidence
• Confirmation over challenge
• Performance over principle

Data dependency doesn’t demand attention; it prompts. Therefore, if stories that consistently garner clicks shape editorial decisions more than those that matter, journalism is at risk of losing its moral compass for the sake of a dashboard. What gets measured begins to matter more, while what doesn’t get measured gradually fades into obscurity, leading to “engagement optimization” narrowing the diversity of issues covered.

I understand that data is crucial to guiding a digital content endeavour. I’m not arguing against the use of data; I’m warning about becoming overly dependent on data, as is increasingly the case. Journalism’s foundation, courage, is becoming a casualty of engagement metrics.

One notable exception to the trend is The Kyiv Independent. Founded by journalists fired from the Kyiv Post for defending editorial freedom, they intentionally built a reader-supported newsroom. Their success, with over 70% of its revenue coming from recurring member contributions, is a beacon of hope for independent journalism. The Kyiv Independent has no paywalls, no algorithm-driven headlines, and no donor influence. Its values, listed on its ‘About’ page, begins with “The Kyiv Independent serves its readers and community, and nobody else.”

Daryna Shevchenko, the CEO, states:

“We want to ensure reliable information from Ukraine reaches as many people as possible… regardless of their views, values, or political stance.”

Despite being funded by the public, The Kyiv Independent isn’t held hostage to engagement metrics, making their model rare, and that’s precisely the point.

In the absence of structural guardrails, newsrooms begin to prioritize:

• What keeps readers engaged
• What retain paying subscribers
• What doesn’t alienate key audience segments (Dancing around the ebb and flows of political correctness.) 

Journalism gradually starts avoiding:

• Stories that challenge
• Slow-moving stories
• Stories that don’t trend
• Stories that don’t “convert”

Access to journalistic content isn’t lost, but courageous journalism is. I’m not talking about idealism; I’m talking about integrity-by-design structure, which can look like:

• Editorial firewalls to protect against growth (number of views, likes, reports, subscribers) pressures
• A dual metric: performance and public benefit
• Transparency reports showing what data isn’t influencing
• A funding model that allows for slow, essential journalism-even when it doesn’t “sell” (Think of crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe and Kickstarter.)

The goal isn’t to reject data; rather, the goal is to refuse to be manipulated by it, to feel unrestrained to publish something without knowing how it’ll perform. This applies to all online content created for monetization, not just journalism. When the content must perform to justify its existence, then performance becomes the decision maker, the editor-in-chief, so to speak. This is how the truth is vanishing—quietly, efficiently, and without resistance.

Plato once said, “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” He wasn’t dismissing evidence; he was defending wisdom. Today’s journalism has a different perspective on Plato’s wisdom, which is why his wisdom is endangered.

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Nick Kossovan is the Customer Service Professionals Network’s Social Media Director (Executive Board Member). Feel free to send your social media questions to nick.kossovan@gmail.com. On Twitter and Instagram, follow @NKossovan.