On Substack

Illustration credit: Joro Chen, Brand Designer at Substack We want to have an honest conversation about how publishers are feeling about and using AI. These tools are in their infancy, and while the norms around their use and disclosure are evolving rapidly, we think it’s important to ask top writers, creators, and thinkers about their work, their businesses, and how they intersect with where AI stands today.

“Spot the difference” by Joro Chen, Brand Designer at Substack Earlier this week, we announced a feature that allows readers to scan text published to Substack to see how much of it is estimated to be written by hand or with AI assistance.

We caught up with veteran British soccer writer, podcaster, and historian of the game Jonathan Wilsonon the eve of his sixth World Cup final. Over the past six weeks, he’s been all over the map, filing from Mexico City, Guadalajara, Houston, and Boston for The Guardian, Bloomberg, the Paris Review, and more, while bringing literary dispatches and wry analysis to his own newsletter Wilson’s World (of football).

Whether you’re spending your Substack summer tinkering with your existing newsletter or podcast or launching your first one, we’re shipping features that make it easier to publish, customize, and distribute your work, and engage with your audience. We look forward to hearing what’s most useful and what you want more of. Here’s the latest.

W. Kamau Bellhas lived many different lives as a host and comedian: one of them centered on the singular conviction that Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period, another in service of an institution (the ACLU’s At Liberty), another at the helm of several documentaries and seven seasons anchoring CNN’s prime-time Sunday night slot with his show United Shades of America.

It can be hard to put your finger on what makes a Substack get-together so memorable. The depth of conversation? For sure. The variety of people in one space? Absolutely. But mainly I think it’s the fact that Substack writers and creators have the same shared notion that culture thrives when everyone is allowed to put their ideas out into the world.

Hunter Harrisis the creator of Hung Up, the twice-weekly Substack newsletter where she takes a forensic lens to our culture’s obsessions and her own. She says she and her audience of nearly 200,000 subscribers share the same “disease”—insatiability—and that they’re bonded by a specific tunnel vision: her willingness to write a dozen pieces about A Star Is Born or spend time tracking down the marriage license of Taylor Swift’s publicist, if that’s what curiosity demands.

Illustration credit: Joro Chen, Brand Designer at Substack Today we’re introducing the next phase of Substack’s native sponsorships program, with an inaugural cohort of flagship partners who are collectively investing millions of dollars into creators on Substack. If you are a Substack bestseller who is interested in participating and shaping the program, you can publish your Creator Kit now.

In this week’s Open Tab, Australian-born, New York–based muckraker Lachlan Cartwright sat down with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie to walk through two decades covering media, money, and power—from The Sun and the New York Post to executive editor of the National Enquirer, where he went from breaking news to becoming an anonymous source in one of the biggest political scandals of the decade.

Joanna Coles has spent her formidable career at the center of media: London’s Fleet Street in the ’80s, New York magazine, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and eventually the chief content officer role overseeing Hearst’s entire global magazine portfolio. She knows intimately what legacy media organizations have looked like at every stage of their life cycle and spent years “managing decline” from the inside.