Link-o-Rama: More big names pop up on Substack

Caitlin Dewey, of Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends, shares her origin story and take on the solo path with Creator Spotlight. It’s well worth a read for her thoughts on building a writing career vs. aspiring to be an Internet personality.

“I don’t want to be a full-time writer. I want to be an Internet personality,” Taylor Lorenz tells the New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka. As Chayka notes, Lorenz’s split with The Post was ultimately a break-up of two entities that didn’t share the same values. At NPR, David Folkenflik shares more details from Lorenz’s Post exit.

Add Daily Beast founder and former Vanity Fair & New Yorker editor Tina Brown to the growing list of biggish media names (Jane Pratt, Van Jones) trying their hand at Substack. Per the NYT, Brown’s new weekly newsletter, Fresh Hell, will be a weekly “notebook-style” missive.

Oliver Darcy, who recently left the helm of CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter to launch Status, said it was “terrifying” to break the Olivia Nuzzi RFK Jr. story as an independent journalist. “When you are at a mainstream media organization, you do have a network; a safety net of people who are checking everything. So when it’s by yourself, it is a little different to push that publish button and you let it fly out into the world,” he tells The Wrap.

Pew is out with a new study on who American adults follow on TikTok. Spoiler alert: It isn’t politicians or traditional news accounts or journalists, per their survey. I’ll be writing about this more in depth later this week.

Substack started with newsletters, but wants to be the dominant creator payment platform for creators working across mediums. Per Semafor, Substack has been “reaching out to influencers, video creators and podcasters to convince them to join the platform,” putting Substack into direct competition with Patreon.

Americans’ trust in mass media is at a historic low, per a new poll from Gallup, bottoming out at just 26% of Gen Zers who express confidence in newspapers, TV and radio to report the news accurately. Which leads directly to why Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are popping up on influencer podcasts and this smart warning from Vox’s Jonquilyn Hill: