While Substack may be a departure from the traditional news formula, its platform has benefited many journalists, including Joseph Politano, the data journalist behind Apricitas Economics. In this episode of We Mean Business, George Headley interviews Politano about what drove him to start his Substack newsletter and what drives him to continue publishing it today. While the initial venture may have been to boost his portfolio for prospective employers, Politano has found satisfaction in breaking down complicated data for readers, even when creating charts can take hours of work. With over 67,000 subscribers, Politano has managed to turn a short-term project into a full-time job, which naturally comes with its own pros and cons.
Transcript
[Intro music]
George Headley: This is “We Mean Business.” I’m George Headley, and today we’re talking about Substack, the social media platform that, in its own words, is a new economic engine for culture. As a business venture, Substack differs from other social media platforms like Instagram or YouTube. It’s mainly made up of blog posts that can use elements such as audio, visual, or written storytelling, and it has steadily become a hub for independent journalists to make a living. I’m joined by Joseph Politano, who’s a data journalist that runs the Substack Apricitas Economics. He focuses on compiling charts for public data to tell business stories to his followers. With over 67,000 subscribers, he tries to keep a consistent schedule for his readers. We talked about his business model, his advice for business journalists hoping to start publishing on the platform, and what he’s seen in his career as a Substacker. We also discussed his opinion on what media organizations are doing wrong and why independent journalism is becoming more successful. Welcome to We Mean Business.
Joseph Politano: I started my newsletter for the first time as like a pitch to employers, in a way. I was like, I’m gonna write this article about unemployment insurance and, you know, that’s what people were really like, wanted to learn about at the time, and then I’m going to be able to send it to people and be like, “Look at the work I did. Can you please give me an RA-ship?” That
strategy did not work out. And so I was like, “Okay.” I started writing very frequently. This is 2021, by like, mid-2022, I was like, “Oh, there’s actually a decent number of people reading this.” And then by late-2022 I had this thought of like, “I might be able to do this full time, and if I don’t try it at 23 I’m never going to have that chance.” Like, when you’re in your 30s and you’re married and have kids, you have a mortgage, you gotta pay for things, you can’t just have a business that fails. So if you’re gonna have a business that fails, do it in your 20s. And I was like, sure, we got to try something. And so I launched it as my full-time job almost three years ago, and that’s all I’ve been doing since then. It’s been more successful than I could have ever hoped, and it’s been incredibly exciting. It’s very helpful that things keep happening in the economy.
Headley: But how can this complex data then be synthesized for the average reader? I asked Politano how he uses his own graphics to tell a story, which is very different from other Substack accounts that use mainly the written word to tell their own narratives.
Politano: One of the best pieces of advice I got when I was just starting out doing news and journalism work more broadly was every piece you write should be doing a job for your audience. And that’s a little bit idealistic, but the point being is that ideally, what I want is for someone to be reading my work and come out of it knowing something or a lot of things that they didn’t know previously.
Headley: When figuring out his branding, Politano took some creative inspiration from a pinkish paper in New York.
Politano: When I was first making the newsletter, I used some of the default chart formats. And then one day, I was like, I need it to stand out more. And I was thinking about this was like a good branding lesson, but I was thinking about if you see that pinkish paper in the garbage, you’re like, “that’s the Financial Times.” I mean, that’s kind of crazy that you see something in the trash or blowing in the wind in lower Manhattan, you recognize the paper as it’s going by. And that’s what I wanted people to have reactions to on the internet, where they see the chart that, all my charts are black and yellow with dark background in specific format, and they would see that, and they’d know that it was mine. And I do think there’s a lot of people who, there’s just a pretty voracious demand for data and also for brevity. So there’s a lot of people, and these people are my audience and so I love them, but I’m sure there’s a lot of people who open my newsletter and they click through the charts, and then they close it. And I would like them to read my work. I need to, you need to admonish your readers a little bit for being lazy. But the point is they gain the most value from the charts, that’s the stuff that they retain the most, because it’s visual experience, and it’s also, that’s the stuff that they send to their friends. You know, “Oh, did you see this?” Just an example, like the trade deficit went really high in March because people were importing a ton of stuff to get ahead of the tariffs. “Look at this chart I saw about the trade deficit.” They don’t screenshot the text and then send it to other people, unless the text is real good.
Headley: We not only discussed what he was publishing, but who he was publishing it for.
Politano: For business journalism, in particular, the people for whom it’s useful..you know, there’s a lot of people for whom, they read my stuff as sort of informational entertainment, the kind of way I think that you watch those videos that are like, “Wow, it’s science.” And I mean that in a complimentary way, it’s just like, these people aren’t economists. They’re not doing it in their day-to-day jobs. They just find it interesting. Yet, there’s also a substantial portion of people who are like, “I’m the manager at a trucking company in eastern Ohio, and it really is important for me to know what the tariffs look like on a day-to-day basis.” Those people are middle or upper management, and to be middle or upper management, you skew older. I do think that that’s like a tougher structural problem with Substack.
Headley: We also spoke on the difficulties of being a data journalist and the never-ending news cycle and his attempts to meet the demands of his readers.
Politano: The pieces I write are 50% charts, 50% words. The effort is 80% charts, 20% words. And so people read it and they’re like, “Oh, that was a nice 15-minute article.” And I was like, “No, you don’t understand. That one chart took like five hours.” It was so difficult, you’ll lose one piece of data that’s a nightmare to work with, or something super detailed that you have to learn the ins and outs of before you can deal with it. And so that’s like the sort of the inherent disadvantage to the specifics of data, I guess business data journalism, econ data journalism, the specific disadvantage to that on Substack is that Substack demands quantity and data journalism is not conducive to quantity. I had, I cannot remember who said this, but there was someone talking about data journalism being an oxymoron of the point of like, yeah, like, data scientists to the extent that it’s different is that they spend six to eight months on one project. The professional researchers write a paper that is 40 or 60 pages where they go through a long piece of data with experimentation and yada yada yada, and audiences don’t have the level of engagement to deal with advanced data science and causality and stuff like that, not that that’s unimportant. But just that most audiences you have to lay so much groundwork to get them. And two, I mean, the more important thing is, like audiences demand a news story right now, and so could be able to come back and say, “Oh, hey! This piece of news happened. Look how crazy it is!” is always going to be more successful than coming back a year later and being like “A year ago, this crazy thing happened. Look at how everything has changed since then.” And that’s a very frustrating part about just the general idea of business data journalism.
Headley: Now we continue to talk more about Substack and the independent journalists that use the platform, but we talked a little bit more about big media and the implications that Substack has on them.
Politano: The business model of a news organization as a large group institution is really struggling, and it’s partly struggling because the internet has sort of disentangled everything. The whole point of getting a newspaper in 1995 is that it would have the box scores and the stock market picks and whatever happened with the president the day before. And the fact that if you care about the stock market, you can just look at that, and you don’t have to buy the rest of the paper. It’s actually really bad for papers as an institution. But I think the other thing is that people don’t have loyalty to the abstract notion of a newspaper. They like specific writers, people like, you know, Jamelle Bouie, and they have abstract feelings about the New York Times, but they don’t, you know, they’re not reading the New York Times just because it’s the New York Times. They’re reading the New York Times because it has writers that they like. And the benefit of Substack is you just get to have the writers that you like. You can filter out all the people that you don’t want to read from. And both in the sense of like you don’t like their opinions, which is fair, you can’t win everybody over, but also there’s stuff that you’re not interested in in a newspaper. Most of my reading on Substack is econ-based, but it’s like a distinct flavor from what you’re going to get in the Financial Times. It’s a lot of economists writing, “Oh, this is the paper that I just finished” or “This is a presentation I gave about some interesting research.” And it’s a lot less of like, “Here’s the news story of the day.” And I’m doing, “here’s the news story of the day” stuff. I’m sure there’s a lot of people who read because they want that, but I’m sure there’s also a lot of people who are like, “No, I don’t want that kind of day-to-day snappy journalism. What I want is the more broader view of the philosophy of econ stuff,” which I, Adam Tooze writes a lot about that stuff, and I don’t touch it at all.
The benefit of Substack as a platform is it’s like you are reading an infinite newspaper, and you’re just picking the parts of it that you like. And I think that people then have a direct connection to me. The difficulty for someone writing in the New York Times is like you gotta catch readers up to speed every single time. You gotta say, “You remember when this thing happened? Do you remember what the policy was? You remember, blah blah blah? Here’s where the effects were.” And if you’re somebody who cares a lot about housing, I follow people who do a lot of work in housing advocacy in California, and there’s specific quirks of California state law that are really important to them, like CEQA, which is the California Environmental Quality Act, or Prop 13, which was the ballot measure that capped property tax increases, like 80 years ago. But if you’re from Connecticut, you don’t need to care about any of this stuff. And so the idea of, like if you’re in the New York Times writing about a new bill in California, you have to catch people up and like, “Hey, this is what Prop 13 did. This is CEQA. This is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here’s what this bill does.” And if you’re someone who has, I’ve been running this for years, you can just say, “Here’s what this bill does, here’s all the details now, here’s my personal opinion on it.” And people are going to know where you stand and have that background information of previous things that you said. And so I think it builds a much more durable relationship with distinct authors. I also think the reason why the magazine the Economist is so successful is partly because they strip everyone’s bylines and they force you to present in this sort of economic wonkery British speak that every columnist writes very similar. And if you’re like, super in the weeds, you can figure out who wrote what, and you can learn that like, “Oh, this person has really interesting articles that I love reading. And this person, not so much,” but to your average viewer, they don’t know. Your average reader doesn’t know. So they actually build a connection with the Economist as the abstract entity, and not with the writers. And at the New York Times, it’s like totally the opposite, where no one builds a connection, because the New York Times, like the New York Times opinion section, is going to have a pro-any-policy column, and an anti-any-policy column. And so, like, people don’t know what the abstract New York Times stands for. They know what specific writers stand for, but they only know a few specific writers at the New York Times. So I think that business model is struggling to adapt into the internet age. And I see this as a natural progression. Has its own very large downsides, but that’s where I saw the future going, and that’s why I was content to be on Substack rather than trying to get a traditional journalism job.
Headley: I asked Politano what he thought about Substack as a community.
Politano: I was worried for the longest time that like, Substack is growing, it’s going to, quote, unquote, stop growing, and then people are going to kind of fight over the remains of the pie. That has never happened. That was the fear I had starting out. That’s never happened. I think both because the growth has been continued, even if it is at a lower rate. But also I just think that people feel like similar levels of camaraderie, and that the people view each other as complements, not competition. Like I said, it’s that endless newspaper. The fact that something else exists in the endless newspaper is not actually really competing with you, because the newspaper is already endless, and you’re already competing with all text-based media in the world. The fact that someone else joins Substack is not actually a threat to you. It’s probably helpful in the narrow sense, because they’re right next to you.
Headley: That was Joseph Politano, the data journalist of the Substack Apricitas Economics. My name is George Headley, and this is “We Mean Business.”
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