The paid-newsletter platform, founded in 2017, on which journalists who had been fired, opinion writers who had been asked to stop and novelists with a grievance discovered they could charge $5 a month and call it independence. Peaked as a word in 2021, when 'I'm starting a Substack' became the standard announcement of leaving a job. The record notes it is also a verb, a genre and a warning.
For the record: Substack is not a joke, it is a shorthand. The joke is what happens when someone outside the group tries to use it as one.
'He has a Substack now' said about a former colleague in 2022 with a tone the record can only describe as sympathetic. The record notes the Substack had 212 subscribers and a post about why the media is broken.
Where did you see it, and when? A date and a source that still resolves.
