I’m sure that opinions vary widely on this, but I follow people and not companies.

With platforms like substack, X, and LinkedIn it seems easier than ever for an independent journalist to cultivate an audience.

As long as they create quality content, I’m more than happy to subscribe to whatever platform they choose to use.

True quality (especially once you get into the niches) is extremely valuable/interesting and to paraphrase Van Gogh, wheat is wheat, even if townsfolk see it as grass at first.

> With platforms like substack, X, and LinkedIn it seems easier than ever for an independent journalist to cultivate an audience.

Cultivating an audience is one thing but serious investigative journalism often takes considerable amount of time and money. Most journalists I’ve seen on Substack and similar platforms seem to mainly do commentary, summaries of topics, interviews, and the like. There is a place for that of course but it isn’t really filling the need for investigative journalism too well at the moment.

And it is also easy to waste time on multi year projects that does not fit you current audience. If you present the result you need to slant it in the correct way to sell subscription. This is very visible with journalist that live on the whim donations.

You see people become more and more extreme because that is what get them donations. This might just be what works with humans.

"audience drift" or "subscriber drift"

Maybe not Twitter anymore but yeah

Not a paid solution, but great for testing models yourself: AWS bedrock.

Wonky documentation (definitely released too early), but imo the best model agnostic diy solution out there.

We actually ran this train of thought with our startup right now. The problem? Not everybody knows what questions to ask. For non-power users it’s usually better to present digestible information and create docs that answer questions they didn’t even know they had.

Great read.

Side note: please fix your header. Makes the website appear so much less professional than the information it provides really is.

Thanks! Would you be able to send me a screenshot of what you're seeing? It may be formatting differently on your screen than mine. [email protected].

Coming from a family that lived in soviet russia (and still partly is), this reminds me of Putin’s 85% approval rating.

But if you ask anybody in private, nobody voted for him…