Josh Blackman (South Texas), Some Tentative Thoughts on Substack:
Many readers frequently ask if I would set up a Substack. My usual response is that all of my posts are freely available on the Volokh Conspiracy. They reply that Substack makes it easier to read content in newsletter form, delivered right to their inboxes. That point is fair enough, but there is some extra amount of work that goes into preparing newsletters. As regular readers know, my posts are usually a form of stream of consciousness that could benefit from more proof-reading. I can justify this approach because, as I often say, readers get what they paid for. To be sure, Reason.com does provide some advertising revenue, which is split among the bloggers, but the amount is not sufficient to align incentives.
At least for me, the primary reason I write is to reach as broad an audience as possible to disseminate my ideas. That goal runs headlong with the entire notion of a paywall. At some level, it irks me that law professor charge people for their work. Our job is to diffuse information to the world. Law professors are fortunate that law reviews publish their articles online without fee. In other disciplines, peer reviewed journals are extremely expensive to access. From time-to-time, professors publish Op-Eds in major outlets like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. On someone else’s platform, the paywall cannot be avoided. But why should a professor erect his own paywall?
The simple answer is money. Do the math. Look at what some law professors charge for subscriptions to their Substacks, and multiple that figure by the number of paid subscribers.
Paul Horwitz (Alabama), Free Should Be the Strong Default Setting for Academics’ Substacks and Other Online “Work”:
As a general matter, legal academics’ Substack pages, at least insofar as they’re about law, should be entirely free. … American law professors are generously paid, if not greatly overpaid. There’s nothing shocking about wanting more money on top of the salary we already get to write and publish in fulfillment of our obligations as scholars. (Or, as in the case of writings on Substack, podcasts, etc., our service obligations, since these writings rightly do not count as scholarship.) But we certainly don’t need more money on top of that. …
the strong default should be that all of this stuff is free and readily accessible, preferably without so much as the requirement that one go through a subscription process even for free content. I don’t subscribe to any academic Substack that charges a fee, at least beyond subscribing for the public material only, and I encourage others to do likewise and to publicly criticize academics–again, especially legal academics–who do charge for their content. Not to put too fine a point on it: Legal academics who profit off of fee-based enterprises of this sort without excellent, clearly stated reasons are acting immorally and to the detriment of the academic enterprise.
Josh Blackman (South Texas), Some More or Less Tentative Thoughts on Substack
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