Please don't post this way, regardless of how bad another comment may be. Even if you're right (as in this case I believe you are), it damages the container here.
Keep in mind they literally have 0 accusers, and when the women they worked with were interviewed they all had 0 complaints, and even at the time of publishing the book was categorized as satire. The name "The Exile", IIRC, refers to the fact they were a satire of the piece of shit Americans that Ames and Taibbi witnessed coming to Russia as the USSR was falling in order to ravage the country in its moment of weakness.
Next let's confront Steven Colbert on his past as a right wing nutjob.
His wiki[1] says "Women portrayed in the book have gone on record to defend Taibbi, stating that none of the sexual harassment portrayed in the book ever happened."[2]
"Raise doubts" is a bit stingy. Here is what one of the allegedly-harrassed women had to say (in the Paste article):
“These claims that Matt would do this stuff are ridiculous,” she said. “I left The eXile because we started dating, and Matt was worried about impropriety. He didn’t even ask me out at work! Matt is a fundamentally decent and kind person.”
The smear seems to me to have been completely refuted on the facts, and there's a second issue: if it hadn't been, there's no way those mainstream publications would have retracted it en masse (especially not given the social climate around that topic). When was the last time they all did that? It's practically a magic trick to get them to do that.
We think Patreon is awesome. It's a great general purpose tool for supporting creators, and the fact that it is so successful shows that people are willing to pay for stuff they value.
Substack is focused on letting writers start their own publication - top to bottom - with subscriptions as an integral part.
To add to Chris's point (this is Hamish), I think Substack is just really simple. As a writer, I like the idea of not having to think about building and designing my own site, or coming up with various payment and rewards tiers, so I can focus almost all of my time on writing.
As a writer who goes after very powerful people, how does that affect your work in terms of these financiers/banks trying to pressure you or your employers. Are tools like Substack designed to help writers stay independent?
I think that's definitely going to be a major motivation for journalists going forward. The media landscape is becoming more and more rigid and it is becoming harder to challenge certain points through the old networks and newspapers. So having reporters be financially independent would be huge for investigative reporting, which is one of the areas that has been cut the most in the new era of clickbait media.
Another thing -- what Substack is trying to do is to solve a problem that has existed in media forever. Writers of all types have always been compensated in an indirect, convoluted way, by publishers who get some or all of their revenue from ads. This forces writers to address audiences through layers of middlemen who may or may not want to meddle in the material. The Substack model could end both direct and indirect censorship.
This is definitely part of our motivation for making Substack. When readers pay writers directly, the writers are accountable to those readers, and not e.g. advertisers.
From an investigative journalism standpoint, hypothetically, do you envision soft releases to your paid subscribers followed by syndicating(?) the greater story to traditional outlet?
>The Substack model could end both direct and indirect censorship.
There will come the inevitable time when Substack will be pressured to censor/boot content creators for all of the usual reasons, especially if it becomes the home of a new investigative journalism model. Does Substack have any particular commitments/limits regarding content?
I like to think the paywalled feedback loop between creators/readers can help isolate controversial journalism topics from drive-by scrutiny by provocateurs of all politics.
