The New Media Status Flex

Why your favourites are rejecting mainstream success (but not really) to go independent

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Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

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The job of traditional media is not just to convey information and inform opinion. It isn’t just to inform us of what we can know. It is to select and curate what it is that we should know. To prioritise one narrative over others depending on the editorial outlook of the publication or broadcaster and to translate what happens in the world in a way which aligns with and reinforces that narrative. So there has been power in being someone who helps generate the narrative as long as traditional media has existed.

When veteran UK magazine editor Farrah Storr moved to Substack in 2021, I had been writing independently on Patreon for almost two years along with the traditional media work I’ve done for more than a decade, and continue to do. Storr taking the job at Substack was the first concrete sign for me that media — the kind of media I had been working in, which was broadsheet newspapers and women’s magazines — was going to have its talent lured away with glamorous, unprecedented promises like potentially decent remuneration, editorial autonomy and an ability to publish work that the old media model wrongly and constantly declared undesirable to readers.

I jumped ship to Substack after Storr’s move, presuming that Substack had hired her largely to do one thing (apart from share the expertise acquired over a long and accomplished editorial career), and that was to get her contact list out and and start poaching. Given the bad conditions, poor pay and seething resentment under which most of my colleagues in media subsist, grumbling amongst ourselves but never outside media circles for fear of losing that ever-tenuous badly paid gig, I guessed that Storr would have a pretty high success rate. If Substack were going hard on acquiring writers in the UK then they would be doing it in the US too, and that meant — or at least so it seemed to me — that the shift in power from legacy platforms toward smaller and more independent media was about to pick up pace.

Several years later, Substack is really starting to disrupt things. In a recent interview with Pandora Sykes, legacy editor Tina Brown — a woman who represents the ultimate magazine editor for many — declared that “magazines are mostly done”. Sykes wrote in the article that “Tina Brown starting a Substack, means something about the state of media”. Jennifer Rubin, whose political commentary was so long associated with The Washington Post, is now here on Substack, having founded The Contrarian. Paul Krugman left The New York Times to write independently on Substack and has just written about why, writing that he believes “that the story of why I left says something important about the current state of legacy journalism”. These people are not anomalies.

Yes, they are part of a journalistic old guard — a generation that can recall decent pay and relative job security, and who have access to financial security and status that most of us don’t. Their media is not one that my own generation would ever recognise or had any experience of. Newspapers were well into their death throes when I first started writing for them around 2015. Yet despite the lack of safety net and the sorts of followings veterans can bring over with them, younger writers and journalists are increasingly electing to operate independently too. Sniffing smoke on the air, they are heading upwind and launching platforms of their own on Substack and elsewhere. It’s no longer an ‘alternative’ move and is now becoming the standard and sensible move. One that makes writers and journalists look relevant and culturally aware rather than like people who couldn’t make a success of the ‘real’ thing which, for a long time, has been the legacy perspective on independent writing.

A key moment, as I see it, was when independent journalist Ken Klippenstein broke the Luigi Mangione manifesto on his own platform, forcing several legacy publications to give him attribution for it or look out of touch themselves. Acknowledging this growing influence of independent media or platforms like Substack is not something old guard institutions like doing. I know this because I have worked for them. They operated for years as though Substack did not exist, and writing here did feel like a parallel reality until the last year or so, when things began to change rapidly and palpably.

This one move by Klippenstein revealed a shift in the rules and consequently, in how things will operate going forward. While some in traditional media do still sneer at those who have elected to publish on independent platforms, the scoffing begins to look silly when these former colleagues own their audience, earn more money (or even some money) and can report on stories or react to what is happening more nimbly for an engaged, enthusiastic readership. The appeal of an autonomous platform — if you can make it work to supplement your reach or your income even a little— is obvious. Not having one is beginning to look dumb, deluded or out of touch.

In her excellent article on the death of the early 2000s romantic comedy trope of the successful and aspirational young female journalist, Gillian Orr cites a Press Gazette article which says that “at least 3,875 redundancies and layoffs across newspaper, news broadcaster and digital media businesses were publicly announced or reported in 2024.” As thousands of journalists and writers find themselves unemployed and legacy media continues on its current depressing trajectory, a simultaneous status shift is taking place. Autonomy, and not institutional heft, is becoming the new status symbol in media.

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Image credit: Asher Perlman

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The optics of media - particularly women’s magazines - are important. Success signalling is essential to gaining and maintaining respect and relevance. While many journalists and writers have moved to Substack with refreshing frankness about coming out the wrong side of the legacy wood chipper a few pints of blood lighter now that protecting those relationships is not a basic requirement of staying fed, others are still pulling the same outdated industry bullshit that was their former bread and butter. Not all of us have Krugman’s clout or leverage. Most would still prefer not to burn bridges with big platforms as he has (very politely, but nonetheless) done with the NYT. Most can’t afford to. But we don’t have to play by the old rules either when the game has clearly changed.

When I was living in London and working as a beauty editor, colleagues in the industry who lost their job would put out an announcement on Diary Directory — the online database and news platform for fashion and beauty industry people — declaring that they’d ‘gone freelance’. This news sat nestled amongst the new job announcements and vacancy listings.

While occasionally someone did of course elect to go freelance, these announcements became a euphemism for leaving a magazine or newspaper job — usually not of one’s own volition — without having secured another one. The optics of value took precedence over the reality of being valued. It would have looked unacceptably weak to say ‘My contract wasn’t renewed because of budget cuts’ in an industry where flying business class to New York and Paris on a brand’s money and frequenting hotels you couldn’t even afford to buy lunch in is completely standard.

The result is a lot of people moving into independent publishing while proclaiming very vocally that they are rejecting a conception of mainstream success which no longer serves them. I’m delighted to see anyone make a go of it here on Substack, particularly when traditional media outlets are generally so busy trying not to drown that it doesn’t occur to them to check whether their panicked flailing is battering journalists and writers bloody.

But please. Please can we just not? As we move out of the most egregious esoteric nonsense of the legacy media model, can we leave behind the unsubtle signalling that was essential to staying relevant in it?

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You’re not walking away from traditional conceptions of success in legacy media if the flames are licking your back as you make your exit. You’re running for your life. ‘Rejecting the traditional success model’ is a success flex for those who recognise that eyeballs are leeching from old media with the speed of Trump overturning the TikTok ban but the imperiousness of big platforms remains as bloated as ever. Those, like me, who have come to Substack to find a form of success that doesn’t require a side gig in legacy media success performance art are not, at this point, taking some daring avant garde career risk or turning down the sparkling status of mainstream outlet respectability.

Those outlets can no longer offer mainstream respectability and this is why people are leaving them. While it may indeed be the case that editorial overreach (which is at least part of the grievance Krugman cited for his decision to leave the New York Times) has escalated in the extreme polarisation of the last decade or so, it is also the case for the first time that writers have other options. You could scrap with an editor over an ideological point in a piece of opinion writing, or you could just publish it yourself.

Legacy platforms still have power — especially the behemoths — but they no longer have a monopoly on narrative and they certainly don’t elevate writers and journalists to lasting status. They are cultural artefacts of ‘the before’, and those whose careers are entirely reliant (both for access to a platform and to make a living) on traditional media are starting to overheat as temperatures rise, budgets shrink and workloads increase exponentially. We have entered the chaos era, in which people are doing what they have always done — going where there is more social traction, status and potentially money.

In coming to Substack or establishing other independent platforms, writers and media figures are responding to a cultural shift which sees conceptions of success move away from centralised, gatekeeper sources to more diversified ones. Not to mention the irresistible temptation of not having to take an editorial line when you don’t want to or feel deeply compromised by being asked to. While a great editor makes a writer’s work infinitely better, most professional writers have wrestled with editors whose amendment to their work went beyond sharpening and critiquing it to demanding that it get in ideological alignment with the editorial position. Many writers I know have withdrawn work, or threatened to withdraw it, from bigger outlets when this happens. I’ve done it myself. Generally you don’t get paid, you waste a lot of time, and you burn professional bridges no matter how careful or respectful you are when you refuse to profess a view under pressure that you don’t actually hold. Do it too often and you’ll find yourself with no legacy media work at all.

The reality is that working for state media, network tv, magazines or newspapers has never meant less or been lower status than it is today. People edging out of those arenas and into independent digital platforms are seeking status where it lives now, and that’s okay. But let’s not project it — as some of the spooked among us are — as a daring rejection of a celebrated or lucrative position of financial comfort and social influence. Or a quest for enlightenment at great personal risk, like walking out into a desert to find yourself. That’s not what this is. Writers and journalists turning up here are coming out of the desert and not into it. For the most part they’re not renegades, they’re thirsty people looking for a well to dunk their heads in.

It is entirely to be celebrated that any of our number who have worked in newspapers, magazines, broadcasting or publishing are realising that they do have market value, actually. That the strong and familiar message from employers and editors that it is the platform, and not the writer, broadcaster or journalist who has worth and value, and draws in the reader, listener or viewer, is no longer true if it ever were.

So what does it tell us that legacy media people are rocking up to Substack to claim a deeply ruminated rejection of the life they had before, some contemplatively and authentically, and some performatively? It means many things, most of them good. It means that some haven’t yet realised that the optics of old media aren’t needed here, which makes the grand narrativising look like a trauma response when you could just say ‘I think my ideas are good and I’m tired of being told they aren’t. I’m tired of being told that crumbs are a five-course meal.’

It tells us that the era of centralised media taste making is done, which is very good. The class-based boys-and-girls-club of legacy media is unable to maintain dominance in the present climate. There is now an acceptance (if a reluctant one) that there are diverse audiences with differing needs and preferences, and there is a market in serving those audiences rather than ignoring or excluding them. It’s no longer mainstream versus niche. We are in the era of niche.

Writers are not here rejecting status, success and attention. We are here trying to find it as we always have been because writing professionally is a privilege but it becomes a redundant one if no one is reading and you can’t feed your family. Or afford to have one in the first place. We’re not enlightened truthseekers. We are mostly bedraggled, angry, recovering escapees and rejects from careers in which most of us were treated badly, paid badly, and repeatedly told to pipe down and be grateful for it.

We are not rejecting success in favour of autonomy, we are recognising that in this new reality, success is autonomy. Writing professionally is challenging, not lucrative for the vast majority, and sometimes demoralising. As everything changes, it becomes an increasingly untenable career path for many. But that’s true everywhere, pretty much. If there’s a decent chance my particular ship is going into the rocks (and it really might), I’d rather steer it myself. So would a lot of us. Most professional writers and journalists are not here being liberated, we’re here being desperate and pissed off and exhausted. The liberation may come, if we’re lucky, as a consequence of going our own way now that we are able to do it.

My book, Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By is out now! If you’d like to order the hardback, audio or Kindle editions, they’re linked below.