Journalists must accept a tradeoff of stability or control. Traditional publications offer access to institutional resources, stable income, and verifiable credibility, but writers sacrifice meaningful control over their creative process. Historically, the alternative of going independent granted writers full ownership of their work, but left them on their own to navigate financial uncertainty and shoulder the full burden of building and sustaining a paying audience.
This tradeoff persists as a false dichotomy of the antiquated media systems we have grown accustomed to. Despite decades of exponential technological advancement, today’s independent platforms continue to shift the responsibility of growth, funding, and audience conversion onto the very writers who create the value that sustains these platforms.
In the current media environment, there is more demand than ever for writers to own their perspectives. However, to compete in this rapidly changing landscape, independent journalists must also become skilled marketers, business managers, content strategists, and publishers - all while performing in-depth reporting and producing high-quality, differentiated work. This challenging, multi-functional role is an additional full-time job that dissuades many from making the leap to independence, ultimately limiting our access to the nuanced points of view necessary for building a better understanding of our world.
Meanwhile, the platforms claiming to enable these writers to create independent businesses reap the benefits of this hard work, often without providing significant support or infrastructure in return.
We no longer have to accept this tradeoff. We can create a new system for supporting, distributing, and discovering independent journalism - one that connects writers, readers, researchers, contributors, and moderators within a cohesive community. Importantly, this system can integrate the resources, support, growth, and monetization directly into the infrastructure of the platform itself, taking the burden off of the writers.
Writers can go independent, fully own their perspectives, maintain their creative freedom, and earn competitive monetization rates while still benefiting from institutional resources, stable income, and verifiable credibility. Writers deserve a platform that aligns with their goals rather than imposing external pressures to chase clicks, optimize algorithms, or sacrifice quality for virality to hit growth targets for the platform.
Aemula is committed to developing a new business model for journalism, a third career path for writers - one without the tradeoff. It will be a long journey to make this a reality, but we must start cultivating an ecosystem that truly supports independent journalism now. This week, we highlight writers who see the same cracks in the foundations of our current systems and are striving to make their impact.
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The Watch
Written by Radley Balko, an award-winning investigative journalist previously working at The Washington Post and Huffington Post, and author of Rise of the Warrior Cop and The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist.
“When I was fired from the Washington Post a couple years ago, regular readers told me they had canceled their subscriptions in response. That was flattering, but I also discouraged them from doing so. There were and still are a lot of people doing important work at the Post, and who had nothing to do with an Opinion editor’s decision to let me go. I also continued to subscribe myself.
But Jeff Bezos’s interference last October to stop the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris in November changes the equation a bit for me. If Bezos truly gave a damn about journalism and a press that’s adversarial to power, he could set up a trust to fund the paper in perpetuity, appoint an independent board to govern it, and remain pretty hands off. He could probably do this with a fraction of what he makes on the interest from a single year of Amazon Prime subscriptions.
Bezos didn’t buy the Washington Post to make money. He bought it for clout and esteem. But he’s also clearly willing to infringe on the paper’s independence and diminish its reputation if he thinks it may threaten his other business interests.”
The Parnas Perspective
Written by Aaron Parnas, an attorney, independent journalist, and winner of Substack’s TikTok Liberation Prize, now serving as a creative advisor for Substack.
“The Washington Post is bleeding out right now. In 2021, the Washington Post had approximately 22.5 million daily active users.
The number now: 3 million.
If you want to know why, the answer is simple: when newspapers and media companies are bought by billionaires, they lose value with everyday Americans. That’s not to say there aren’t fantastic journalists at the Washington Post. There are. But, a newspaper owned and operated by Jeff Bezos is not one that I want to read.
It’s one of the reasons I became an independent journalist. I’m 25 years old. I started college at 14 years old and always knew that one day I would want to educate others. It’s why I went to law school and graduated at the ripe age of 21, one of the youngest in the country at the time. It’s why I launched this Substack page and it’s why I provide hourly, timely news updates on TikTok and elsewhere.”
@jasmine
Written by Jasmine Sun, a former product manager at Substack, co-founder and director of Reboot, and tech policy advocacy affiliate at Mozilla.
“Legacy media had undervalued individual voices for centuries, and Substack saw an opportunity for arbitrage.
To be clear, I don’t think startups can solve most social issues, nor will Substack fix every problem plaguing media today. In particular, I don’t know if the subscription model suits projects that require a high upfront investment of time and money (e.g. books, films, science, investigative work), and it can be easy to get audience captured if you’re too sensitive to the ups and downs of a revenue chart. No product is a panacea; no single act will save us. But imagine a Venn diagram where one circle is “profitable business ideas,” and the other is “things that are good for the world.” They aren’t the same circle, not at all—but there are precious opportunities in the overlap.
Given all this, you might wonder why I’m leaving. I’ve had an excellent and edifying time, so it’s a hard job to quit. But I also didn’t plan to work in tech—I wanted to be a writer. I’d spent summer 2020 recruiting for journalism jobs, of which there were none, and everyone was fleeing to Substack anyway. I thought if I couldn’t be a writer, then supporting them here would be the next-best thing. That was the right call. But I never forgot my first goal, and today conditions are different.”
Interested in cross-posting your content to Aemula? Reach out to writers@aemula.com to get started! With cross-posting, you can:
Instantly expand your audience
Increase your earnings
Maintain full ownership of your work
Plus, you will have the opportunity to access community resources and grants to support the content you want to create! Cross-posting comes with no costs, no obligations, and you can stop or remove your content at any time.
We have launched the first open version of the Aemula platform, now live at aemula.com! Users can claim a one-month free trial by simply creating an account today!
If you want to support any of the writers we spotlight, we highly encourage you to subscribe to their individual publications. If you want to support independent journalism more broadly, we offer both paid and free subscriptions for you to stay informed!
All subscription revenue is reinvested directly into the independent journalism community.
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