Casey Newton, The Verge’s longtime Silicon Valley editor and the creator of The Interface newsletter, is leaving the publication to start a newsletter on Substack, reports Sarah Jeong of One Zero.
Here is an excerpt of an interview that Jeong conducted with Newton:
When did you make the decision? When did Substack manage to seduce you away?
I have been talking to Substack — just about their company — basically since they started it. They had approached me last year with a pretty compelling offer to jump. At the time, it just didn’t feel like the right move.But a year later, the pandemic came along, and it just changed a lot for me. I sort of realized that I could do a ton of my job from inside my house. I could do all this digital reporting and could maybe even work on some new and different things because I had all this extra time on my hands.
It’s sort of like you’re in jail, and you have nothing but time to think about what you’ll do on the outside. That’s sort of how I felt during the pandemic. I turned 40, and… Substack just did some interesting things. They’re really helping writers build communities, they’re helping readers discover new writers, and some writers are having this incredible success out there on their own.
So that was one set of factors. Another factor was just that I’ve been a journalist for 18 years now. The entire time, I’ve been nervous about what’s going on in the ad market. First I saw the web come along and disrupt the print newspapers I was working for.
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