Nobody Wants To Talk About Why The Ringer Is Pivoting To Substack

A media company launching a series of paywalled newsletters is not, on its own and on its face, a strange thing to do. AI’s ongoing cannibalization of online search is ravaging website traffic, and programmatic advertising doesn’t provide the kind of revenue it used to. If you were running a website like The Ringer, you might decide that it makes financial sense to put writing from some of your most popular staffers behind a paywall. That's exactly what has happened: Sean Fennessey, Zach Lowe, Tom Pelissero, and Bryan Curtis have all recently launched newsletters, only one of which (Curtis’s) is free. This seemingly normal business decision comes with a quirk, though, which is that the newsletters are being published on Substack. Nobody at The Ringer, or Substack, will tell you why. This odd arrangement naturally raises a few questions: Why not just publish these writers’ work on The Ringer’s existing website? Does Spotify, which has owned The Ringer since 2020, somehow not have the technical capability to build its own paywall? If all of this valuable writing is going to live on an entirely different platform, what does that mean for the future of The Ringer’s editorial operation? Have the executives in charge of The Ringer, like seemingly everyone else, surrendered to the idea that Substack is the only place where people will actually read things anymore? I emailed a few questions along these lines to Fennessey, a founder and executive at The Ringer, and more general questions to Lowe, Curtis, and Pelissero. None of them replied. I also reached out to Substack and Spotify, figuring that if the two companies had agreed on some sort of arrangement to produce these newsletters, their respective comms departments would be eager to trumpet their synergistic disruption of the publishing space. Neither company replied. It took reaching out to Ringer editor-in-chief Ben Glicksman to receive something resembling an official response. That came from Mallory Morehead Pritzl, part of the PR team for Spotify: "Thanks for reaching out. We are not commenting at this time."

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