How does Legislata compare to Substack?

Substack is a newsletter platform that, if you work in politics, you likely have heard about. It has attracted a number of writers from the left and right and makes it simple for people to start a publication and set up a paywall. The top ten writers reportedly average $2 million in earnings per year.

Top political newsletters by earnings

While we can argue about the merits of individual authors and whether Substack should draw the lines differently over who gets upfront financial backing from the company, from a technical and business standpoint, it’s pretty great. There are a lot of writers out there who want to have an easy backend and payments infrastructure for their work and Substack provides that at a reasonable price. It has even helped bring new life into local journalism, with publications like Arizona Agenda using the platform to cover politics daily in the Grand Canyon State.

Its role in the political ecosystem

The downside of Substack and newsletters in general - according to interviews we’ve conducted with those working in politics - is that there are a lot of words.

I personally subscribe to a number of large newsletters about politics, economics, and the tech industry. I am rarely able to read a fraction of them every morning when they pile up in my inbox. It’s not just the number of newsletters, but also the length.

Not every thought requires 700 words to explain, especially when it comes to the news. You may wish to let your audience know that a bill has advanced in a State House. But that doesn’t require a newsletter. It certainly doesn’t require one for each one of the thousands of bills in a State House.

If you were to use a newsletter to communicate everything that happens in the political world, you risk placing the burden of filtering what matters to the reader on the reader. They must read the entirely of the issue before knowing if it matters to them. In my experience working on a political publication, I know that often means the readers skip it altogether.

This doesn’t mean that newsletters are bad. I subscribe to a bunch because I find them valuable. But it does mean that they have a specific function that doesn’t cover all use cases.

How Legislata differs

Legislata offers a solution to this dilemma. You can create an office in Legislata (our term for a workspace) and invite people to subscribe, as with a newsletter. Unlike a newsletter, they can set up notifications on specific bills, topics, or people.

When you create a post tagged with that bill, topic, or person, that reader will receive a notification. You don’t need to send an email to your entire mailing list and risk overwhelming them. You can have a quick update, like “H123 advanced from committee”, and it will ping only those who care about H123.

This makes Legislata ideal for high volume writing or working for audiences that may have wildly diverging interests. It also allows you to be an informational curator, rather than just a writer. Maybe your audience doesn’t need opinion articles, but transcripts from City Council meetings, or a set of profiles on the sub-cabinet members of a country. Our mix of a publishing platform connected to legislative, contact, and topic directory allows that to be as easy as a newsletter.

What’s coming next

We’re planning to introduce monetization and paywalls in 2023. Get in touch if that would be of interest to you. We’re also introducing a feature that lets you monitor an issue or create crowd forecasts. It allows you to turn your audience into a community or to communicate in numbers if that’s better suited to the question at hand.

You can, of course, sign up for free to get started or schedule a demo.