Building a Lifestyle vs. an Empire: How Substack Journalists Reimagine Newsroom Norms, Reporting Beats and Role Conceptions

Roberta Fiorito (Ph.D. student) and Karin Assman, “Building a Lifestyle vs. an Empire: How Substack Journalists Reimagine Newsroom Norms, Reporting Beats and Role Conceptions,” paper accepted for presentation at the AEJMC Southeast Colloquium, March 12-14, Tampa. Abstract: This study examines subscription-based independent journalists on Substack through semi-structured interviews with news creators that publish solely on the platform. We explore how they replicate and reject traditional newsroom practices, beat parameters and role conceptions, a necessary update to existing Substack journalism research. Preliminary findings suggest that news creators on Substack tend to fall into one of two models of “building a lifestyle” or “building an empire,” define their beats by either hyper-specific gaps in legacy media coverage or the synthesis of other reporting, and tend to reject an objective observer role for more advocacy- and audience-engagement-focused role conceptions.