From the article, bold added:

The Axios and Vanity Fair articles are the latest entries in a year-plus of hilarious anthropological pieces, often quoting writers returned from the wilds of Substack with harrowing survival tales (“We had to do our own marketing!”). These pieces tend to say a lot more about the cluelessness of the mainstream publications in question than the “independent-operator model” they’re purporting to cover, and these are no exception.

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The notion that Substack is or was a “threat” to traditional media itself speaks to the comical inability of these organizations to understand cause and effect. Happening #1: traditional media companies in the Trump years suffered catastrophic declines in audience trust, which have translated lately into commensurate struggles with clicks and ratings. Happening #2: those companies noticed podcasters like Joe Rogan were drawing, and retaining, mammoth audiences, even as efforts by outfits like MSNBC to create glitzy new on-demand shows hosted by people like former George W. Bush communications director Nicolle Wallace somehow flopped. This was despite the fact that industry pros insisted streaming was “where the young people are.” What went wrong?

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When Substack appeared and had a run of success, news executives treated it as something traitorous and horrifying, being sure now the independents were to blame for their audience crop failures. Vanity Fair with a straight face referred to last year’s “Summer of Substack,” as if describing a disastrous, barely-survived season of hurricanes or pirate raids.

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They were making the same mistake they nearly all made with Trump, confusing symptom with cause. Yes, a few independents have done well, but that’s mainly because the overall quality level of mainstream news plunged so low so long ago, audiences were starved for anything that wasn’t rancidly, insultingly dishonest.

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One would think even the hardest-headed tech executive would see the conceptual problem with the New York Times creating “independent newsletters” — after all, the whole point of a platform like Substack is that it’s not sponsored and overseen by something like the New York Times — but they don’t. They’re convinced that what audiences are responding to with Substack is another collection of widgets: subscription format, a self-edited “content creator,” etc. All they need to swat away the blight of unregulated commentary is a facsimile version of the same thing. (this thinking sounds very familiar)

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It seems so obviously absurd for the New York Times or the Atlantic to try to “strike back” against the tiny slice of market represented by a handful of Substack writers by rolling out their own Death Star version of “independent voices.” If they really wanted to wipe us out, of course, they could just put out a New York Times that sucked less.