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Substacks to Grind

Editorial salaries have been on a grim, steady slide since Graydon Carter gave up the reins—and the generous coffers—at Vanity Fair. But this week, news of The Atlantic’s hiring spree and the elusive promise of Substack riches has reporters following the money.

Derek Thompson
One suspects that after co-authoring a book with Ezra Klein and going on a tour of our nation’s most august green rooms, Derek Thompson saw a chance to make more than $300,000 by going it alone. Photo: Hannah Turner Harts/BFA
Dylan Byers
June 20, 2025

Earlier this year, on the occasion of the publication of Graydon Carter’s much-celebrated codex vitae, When the Going Was Good, one of his former staff writers, Bryan Burrough, published his own, less rose-tinted reminiscence of Vanity Fair’s halcyon days in the pages of The Yale Review. “As I look back today,” he wrote, “Graydon’s Vanity Fair does feel like some lost world, a gold-encrusted Atlantis ultimately inundated by economic and technological tsunamis, its glories only now being picked over by media anthropologists.”