Your Substack is (probably) not getting plagiarized

Let’s have a family meeting.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

If anyone else wrote this first I did not see it 🙏—Kate

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What happens when a 9-to-5 influencer quits their day job? They join a WeWork to cosplay the same content:

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I’ve been “sitting back and observing” as the Substack community culture has defined itself over the past year or so. It can be earnest, even cringe, and too many people post like they just emerged from a bomb shelter after 10 years, but why complain? No one’s hurting anyone. Except, maybe, themselves.

There’s a trend I’ve recently noticed, and it’s related to the fact that, for the first time, Substack as a whole is truly competing with the traditional media, often rivaling it in depth and timeliness. There are a lot of us now fighting for the same number of eyeballs, and nowhere is that tension more apparent than when a particular topic or thesis or prediction from someone’s Substack post later makes an appearance in a media outlet.

“Someone’s been reading XYZ Substack…” the writer will post in Notes, with a screenshot of a New York Times article that also took note of, I don’t know, ballet flats coming back into fashion. Sometimes the overlap seems pretty overt—like when an essay about the underlying theme of motherhood and birth in Severance appears first on Substack and then later in The Atlantic. (I’m making all of these stories up, which is why they are bad.) This might inspire the Substacker to point out that they wrote the original take first, and maybe ask to be linked in the other piece. The examples vary, and so do the reactions, but—often egged on by replies—some culminate in accusations of full-blown plagiarism and threats of legal action.

It brings me no joy to report that you might be thinking about Substack too much.

Major outlets reporting on trends months after I had first written about them in Embedded was maddening to me during my first few years writing this newsletter. It was tempting to my ego to assume that every single one of those writers read my post and then recycled the idea at their day job. In reality, they were just slower to the punch, and it was just annoying, not unjust, that someone else got to announce the same thing to a bigger audience and therefore wider recognition.

I don’t doubt that sometimes nefarious motives are at play, and it is generally best practice for an outlet to link to another outlet if the other outlet wrote a similar piece first. But while there are only a handful of institutional media companies left to keep track of, Substack has over 17,000 writers earning money on the platform. That’s over 17,000 publications whose writers, understandably but unrealistically, expect the same treatment.

It is, in other words, not entirely reasonable to assume that the magazine or newspaper writer that you’re mad at saw your post. If they’re on your email list, yes, that’s suspicious. But if they’re not? I mean this in the nicest way possible: Please be realistic. Of course your newsletter means a lot to you and the people who subscribe to it, and that relationship is what makes Substack so great. But to assume it means anything to anyone outside of that context is often a stretch, and unless you were the source of original reporting that later went uncredited, there’s no real evidence that should make you feel that confident your work was any kind of exclusive inspiration. There are 17,000 of us on top of the dwindling but still substantial number of writers who work full time at traditional media outlets. We’re going to have some of the same ideas and observe many of the same things.

And as shitty as it is, it’s not against the law for someone to express the same idea. Someone taking note of the same trend that you noticed is not plagiarism. This New York Times story coming just a few weeks after this story of mine is probably the most egregious example of something like this for me, and I had to take my lumps.

I’ve been on both sides of the Substack/mainstream media divide, so to speak, and at no point in my 10 years working at Refinery29, The Atlantic, and now Slate have I ever been given or heard of a directive for a writer to take someone else’s idea and do it again themselves. Any time I’d pitch anything in-house, the editor’s first step was to Google the idea and make sure it didn’t already exist. If another outlet beat us to something, we’d add the obligatory “as first reported by.” If your story is overlooked or goes unlinked, that’s a failure of due diligence. But it’s almost certainly not a purposeful act of sabotage. And as Substack competes more and more with institutional media—and magazines like Allure join the platform—it’s likely that best practices will shift to include more acknowledgement of independent media.

I of course understand the impulse to point out that you got there first. As an independent writer, you don’t have institutional support or the audience that comes with it. You feel like the underdog. But putting ego aside, a publication writing your same take a few weeks later is, in fact, an advertisement for your Substack. You were ahead of the big guy, and you should proudly and publicly make that known. It’s a reason for people to subscribe to your newsletter. It’s not a reason to sue the New York Times.