One of the writers of the No. 1 New York Times bestselling book Abundance is betting that by leaving legacy media, he can keep the conversation going around the book, which has become a focal point of political discourse since its release in March.
Derek Thompson, a staff writer for The Atlantic, says that he is leaving the publication after 17 years to launch a Substack, where he hopes to embrace the freedom of independence to explore the topic of abundance, as well as the rapidly changing worlds of science, technology and culture.
“The somewhat simplistic, but more or less true, buzzy take on what’s happening to me is: I co-wrote this book with Ezra Klein. We sort of expected that it would be a fairly popular, but wonky take on the future of liberalism and the Democratic Party, and it became this discourse eating machine,” Thompson tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview.
“Abundance has been an exhilarating ride. It’s been thrilling and confounding and exciting and strange and awesome all at the same time, and I felt like I was never really going to get an opportunity quite like this one to say, ‘all right, this is the launching pad, this is the moment to take that leap of faith,’” Thompson adds. “It’s not that I wanted to cynically take advantage of it. It’s more that I felt like maybe the best way for me to say all the things that I have to say about this one thing in my life, the fallout of and potential of Abundance, the best way to do that was to do so as an independent journalist and not as a sort of de facto semi-political actor working for a non-political institution.”
Thompson and Klein have been all over both traditional media outlets and emerging platforms like podcasts, making their case for abundance as a path forward for a party that seems to have lost its way.
In fact, Thompson draws a clear distinction between how he sees the current state of media with how many other veterans of legacy institutions have adapted to being independent.
“I think some people leave legacy media, and the first thing they do is lob grenades at legacy media. That’s not what’s happening here. I really love The Atlantic. I’ve loved my 17 years there. I have a ton of respect, not only for The Atlantic, but ton of other legacy media organizations,” Thompson says.
Instead, Thompson argues, that media is following so many other economic forces, with a robust world of upstarts, and the biggest players getting bigger. Anyone stuck in the middle, meanwhile, is being squeezed out. It’s a dynamic that Hollywood knows well. “My larger context is that the middle is dying, not that institutional media is dying,” Thompson says.
“I’m always interested in the big story more than interested in the mini story, and the big story here, to me, is the story of empires and city states,” he adds. “It’s not a mistake that me, one of the longest tenured Atlantic writers, is leaving The Atlantic to go independent at the same time that The Atlantic is in the middle of a hiring spree. That’s a really clear sign that, The Atlantics and New York Times’s of the world are getting bigger at the same time that independent media is getting bigger.”
But platforms like Substack have adapted by embracing network effects, with writers and creators joining each other on podcasts and video streams, bolstering their own work and subscriptions in the process. That has included writers like Matt Yglesias, TV personalities, like Terry Moran and Katie Couric, and authors like James Patterson, with many prioritizing video. The platform now has more than 5 million paid subscriptions.
“The network effect is a huge reason why I decided to leave now, there’s no question about it,” Thompson says. “We’re at a point now where a sizable chunk of my favorite writers write for Substack, which means that if Substack were a magazine, it might now be the magazine that after The Atlantic, I read by far more than any other magazine, and I wanted to join the party.”
So Thompson will take his thoughts on abundance, culture, the NBA, technology and other topics to the platform, where he hopes he will have the freedom to express himself in away that he can’t at The Atlantic.
“The response to Abundance has been so big, and I want to be able to respond to the critics and proponents and the politicians and the people who are running for political office,” he says. “It can be difficult, I think, to represent a non-political organization while at the same time discussing a work that’s fundamentally political.”
