And now, the main event…

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.” Amid the nostalgia, the essay contained a fascinating data point. During his 25 years at the magazine, Bryan said he had been contracted to produce three articles a year, each roughly 10,000 words. At his peak, he was earning $498,141 a year, or more than $166,000 per story. These days, Bryan conceded, he would be lucky to receive $20,000 for a 10,000-word story. “People sometimes wonder why I don’t write more,” he wrote. “It’s a chore to explain that, at these rates, it is hard to get that excited.”

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Bryan’s piece came to mind this week after New York magazine’s Charlotte Klein published an article about the $200,000–$300,000 salaries that The Atlantic is now offering to top-tier hires, including nine émigrés from the embattled Washington Post. It was all slightly naive and yet nevertheless depressing: Klein was treating these low-six-figure salaries like aberrant pro athlete contracts. The piece, “Are You a $300,000 Writer?,” posited that the comp was both “extremely expensive” and possibly irrational. “It’s always nice to see people throwing money at journalism, but Jesus Christ, they’re throwing a lot of money, and I’m not sure how it’s sustainable,” one rival editor told her. And yet, she had a point: In a broken business where newsrooms have grown numb to perennial layoffs, this was arguably an auspicious sign of some sort. The premise of the New York piece bemused many at The Atlantic, and across the industry more broadly. First, it seemed to betray the dispiriting limitations of New York’s own salary structure, and perhaps the health of its parentco, Vox Media. It also laid bare the lowered expectations of an entire Gen Y and adjacent media class—Charlotte, her editor, New York editor-in-chief David Haskell, etcetera—who apparently look upon $300,000 a year as a ceiling, when, in fact, it should be the average. Indeed, the piece forgot to mention that most of the ex-Posties who took refuge at The Atlantic were already making around $200,000 or significantly more in their previous jobs, and may have simply taken a standard 10-to-15-percent transfer bump. (To my readers in the media C-suites, and in private equity—I’m sorry if these annual comps are giving you panic attacks.) The larger point is that these salaries aren’t arbitrary—they’re a reflection of an economic strategy that, at least by the standards of a low-margin media business, actually appears to be working. The Atlantic, which happens to be owned by a billionaire, is also now profitable. I was told this week that the company is approaching 1.4 million subscriptions (officially, the magazine touts more than 1 million), though many of those are presumably being sold at pennies on the dollar, albeit with a status-defining tote bag. Atlantic C.E.O. Nick Thompson, an editor by training who has remodeled himself as the sort of quant who obsesses over paywall structures, understands these unit economics, and has run the models that justify paying Tim Alberta and Ashley Parker for work that consumers will slap down a credit card to read. In this new strategy, of course, certain writers—when deployed correctly—become infinitely more valuable, while many more see their value plummet, especially with A.I. starting to eat away at the industry. Nick might not want to say that out loud, and Charlotte may not have explicitly articulated that point in her piece, but it’s the truth, and they both know it—or at least, they should.

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Of course, the economics of independent journalism are quite different. As I wrote earlier this week, for every Matt Yglesias, Casey Newton, and Emily Sundberg that has managed to hack it on Substack, there are thousands more who are destined to burn out, or disappear, before earning enough to cover the cost of living—let alone the cost of editors, marketing, design, legal support, research, etcetera, required to run a true media business. Indeed, there’s a lot of expensive infrastructure at news organizations that aspiring Substackers take for granted, and now have to cover on their own dime. Can a deep thinker like Derek make real money here? There are different versions of success, of course: Bari Weiss’s Free Press has built a business on Substack’s architecture with a $100 million valuation backed by $15 million in investments from hedge fund and media executives who adore her libertarian politics and contrarian posture; Emily brings in north of $400,000 a year, and seems quite content to continue without outside investment. But even clearing that hurdle requires creating and sustaining something—news, insider intel, a sensibility—that people are willing to pay for on an ongoing basis. And while standing up a Substack has become fashionable, it’s also true that even many of the bigger names won’t be able to make it without a significant amount of discipline and hustle. And, if they do, what’s the endgame? These businesses don’t have an obvious enterprise value or an established trading multiple. The history of the writing trade is filled with extremely talented people who followed their hearts without a long-term business plan. No one wants to replay that movie. This week, Oliver Darcy, the former CNN media reporter who struck out on his own to launch Status, a nightly media newsletter that allegedly tops $1 million in annual recurring revenue, urged caution to his old friends in legacy media: “I do think it’s very hard to go out on your own,” he told me for a forthcoming episode of The Grill Room. “It’s not for the faint-hearted, and I’m working… I don’t even know how many hours I work—definitely over 100 a week. I’m slightly worried that a lot of people think it’s easier than it is, and that this is a ticket to get rich. It’s not.” We’re a long way from Graydon’s halcyon days, but I was reminded of his own Grill Room appearance a couple months back. “I think the people that have Substack platforms, they must be working all the time,” he told me. Indeed, this is all a reminder that the writing business isn’t winner-take-all. The industry can only remake itself through guys like Derek and Oliver going off on their own and Ashley, Tim, et al. taking more stable jobs at an ambitious, family-run business. After years of dormancy and nail-biting, the fluidity is a small if positive sign that the publishing business is trying to figure out how to solve its problems rather than bemoan them.