It’s strange to think that I knew what Substack was as soon as it was put in front of me. But I did—it was an attempt to wrap email in a platform, with promising initial promises, but the goal of strengthening Substack itself.Sure, there were a lot of things about Substack that looked good at the outset—the fact that they effectively gave the platform away for free was a vast improvement over the model of charging money after you reached a certain subscriber size—but every new publisher that jo…

Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and media what they think is coming in the next 12 months. At the end of a trying 2020, here’s what they had to say.