Editor-in-Sub-Chief
What platforms reveal when they stop pretending to care about basic principles
I came to Substack for a quiet place. I wanted to rebuild something I hadn't done since before I started and well after high school, sustained long-form journalism. At The Circle Newspaper in Minneapolis, I learned that journalism could mean something. Real reporting. Real stakes. Work that mattered to actual communities.
I'd spent years in broadcast journalism after that. Minutes. Sound. Rhythm. A different muscle. When I thought about writing a grant, I realized Federal Indian Policy reporting could be an avenue I use to work atrophied muscle. I needed to rebuild confidence in long-form first. Columns seemed like the tool. A quiet space. No algorithm. No performance metrics. Around 50 people consistently read what I write about the people, places, policy and politics of Indian Country. Every column. Every time. I'm stunned when I look at the data. Maybe I should start a second account for the poetry from my second book. The one that was shelved and will never be published. No. That's stupid.
Substack felt like a place of possibilities.
Then almost on cue I started looking for a pattern. Old Scratch says nothing is ever as good as we want it to be. Unfortunately this is mostly true.
In April 2023, The Verge's Nilay Patel asked Substack CEO Chris Best if somebody posts "all brown people are animals and they shouldn't be allowed in America," will you censor that? Best refused to answer. He said he didn't want to "engage in speculation" about whether overt racism violated his own terms of service.
Patel pushed back multiple times. "You know this is a very bad response to this question, right? You're aware that you've blundered into this. You should just say no." But Best kept equivocating. He talked about free speech and open discourse. He never said no.
That's when I understood what Substack actually is.
The platform's owner won't say racism is against his rules. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Substack makes at least $2.5 million a year from anti-vaccine newsletters alone, content the Center describes as medical misinformation that can seriously harm readers. The five most popular anti-vaccine newsletters on the platform account for $2.2 million of that annual revenue, with authors earning combined salaries in the hundreds of thousands.
When called out, Best and his co-founders responded with a blog post: "We make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation."
But that's not a principle. That's a choice. And the choice is clear.
I didn't come to Substack for this. I came because The Circle Newspaper showed me a foundation I could use to improve. That in turn reminded me what journalism looks like when it serves actual communities. The Circle was founded in 1980 by the Minneapolis American Indian Center as an in-house publication. I was 1 year old, living 6 blocks way. We are both still publishing. Still covering news, arts, and culture “From a Native Perspective”. Still one of the few non-Tribally owned Native newspapers in the U.S. Still doing work that matters.
That's the model I was returned to. A type of newsroom that may have only existed in my mind. A place where the work danced with triumph and tragedy. It's where I thought I would end up. Editor-in-Sub Chief. Sitting on an old couch in a sub basement of the Indian Center. Laughing and teasing like so many others before and after.
Substack isn't that anymore. I'm not certain it ever was.
You needed somewhere to rebuild. To practice writing the way you used to. Somewhere real. Somewhere that meant something. You thought you found it. But then the person running it wouldn't answer a basic question. And you understood. It wasn't real at all. It was just another place that had already decided what mattered to it. And you weren't it.