Well, that’s just fucking super.
Writing about the failure of patron-supported journalism is itself a kind of confession. It hasn’t worked for me, and I struggle to weigh my guilt around that (should have worked harder!) against what I know is a structural problem. Patron-supported journalism (including newsletters) is both a throwback to the earliest mode of media production and, as it exists today, the newest way for capitalism to suffocate dissent.
Obviously, there have always been audiences, and always been audience members willing to pay a little extra for a creator to keep kith and kin together between gigs. There have always been writers trying to piece together a livelihood by appealing to deep-pocketed friends.
But over the past decade, especially the past five years, several corrosive trends converged, and now an unprecedented number of individual journalists are trying their hand at earning a living, one $8/month subscriber at a time.
Patron-funded news doesn’t work in the combination of post-scarcity news (i.e. when anyone can have a platform because there’s no limit to entry, like owning a printing press) and economic recession where people’s disposable income drops sharply.
Even the first point is enough to kill all but the largest patron-funded news services. The two combined? Guaranteed death sentence.