On Substack

This interview is presented as part of Double Take, a dual series from The Substack Post and On Substack: part culture, part business, all encompassing. For a closer look at Shea Serrano beyond the numbers, read our companion piece on The Post. It’s been a very podcast summer on Substack. In the past few months, longtime voice behind the mic W.

Illustrations by Jac Saik, Designer at Substack We know that finding the right audience and then giving them compelling reasons to continue to support your work is core to being successful on Substack. The features we launched this month allow you to do both these things: reach new subscribers and create richer experiences for your existing ones. Here’s the latest.

Illustration by Joro Chen, Brand Designer at Substack Earlier this year, veteran national security reporter Jeff Steinwas served with an eye-watering $1 million defamation lawsuit after publishing a scoop about an incoming Trump administration official in his publication, SpyTalk. Backed by a number of authoritative sources, Jeff had reported that Keith Bass, the Pentagon’s incoming top health official, had been “effectively fired” from his previous role at the CIA for “poor management”.

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.