Alt-form storytelling, a key magazine-and-newspaper design trend, and hasn’t truly flourished on the modern internet. Axios could go way further than it does.

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…

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Ernie Smith who writes the Tedium and Midrange newsletters. A week ago he had a great story, ‘A Chart-Record Feast 🎶’ in Midrange. Here's what I wrote about it: Last week saw two milestones on the music charts. The first is that “All Too Well” by Taylor Swift reached the number one spot on Billboard’s Hot 100, and at

As Substack reports a million paid subscribers to its newsletters this week, I’m often left wondering what might have happened to the newsletter space had Substack remained a business that only grew as its audience did.Substack started out as a company with a pitch that anyone who wanted to could start a paid newsletter and, with the right amount of work, claim financial independence. But at some point, the company broke this essential model by beginning to accept venture capital money, culmina…

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.

How the power-user web browser Vivaldi has managed to maintain a flexible design philosophy in an era when so much is decided for you online.

Local newspapers have already faced issues with outsourcing and an array of cuts for years. But the threat is changing—and you should know what it looks like.