Facebook recently started Bulletin, a newsletter service with writers like Malcolm Gladwell and the sports reporter Erin Andrews. The demand for newsletters has led to an increasingly fierce competition across the media industry. Moore said he was a fan of Substack newsletters by Patti Smith, Anand Giridharadas and Garrison Keillor.
Earlier this month, a group of prominent comic book writers and artists joined the service. The author Roxane Gay, the tech journalist Casey Newton and the writer Andrew Sullivan are among the writers who have popular newsletters on the platform. Substack, which has more than 500,000 paying subscribers, has attracted a number of top writers, some of whom have defected from mainstream media organizations for six-figure deals or the promise of a lucrative stream of revenue from reader subscriptions.
Moore has published an email newsletter since the early 1990s, using it to rally support for causes like stricter gun control laws and to get the word out on his films, which include the Oscar-winning 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine.” He said he would be bringing his mailing list of nearly 600,000 readers to Substack.