8 Questions for... Arthur Meek
Profit & Delight
works for Substack to make it the home for awesome shows. Found on stage and screen and behind the scenes, he’s a raiser of young kids and resident of semi-rural England. Profit & Delight is a place of characters you won’t meet anywhere else. Close encounters of the local kind. Epiphanies. Substackery. The more you pay, the less you get.
1. Why Substack?
I’m here to build a new economic engine for culture. I’ve been a fan of the company and its vision since day one. Hamish, one of Substack’s founders, gave me my first job as a part-time reporter at a student newspaper 25 years ago. Our lives and careers have run in parallel ever since. Now I’m all-in as we try to midwife a cultural metanoia: a complete change of heart about how audiences value culture and the people who make it.
2. How long did it take you to find your groove?
I'm still not there. My heart is in the theatre - composed words spoken out loud, live, to an audience that understands itself to be engaged in a collective experience. That’s what I’m gunning for online, on Substack.
3. How has it changed you?
Substack is making me work faster and try things out in public. My performance background is acting, which involves a lot of line-learning and rehearsal. As a playwright and screenwriter, I’d spend two or more years working on scripts in stealth. Now I want to work out in the open and bounce things off audiences much earlier.
4. What mistakes have you made?
I should probably be more consistent - focus on one thing and gather a community around it. I’m so excited about all the possibilities - dashing off posts on the mobile app, broadcasting old TV series I’ve made, serializing a larger political work on a democratic alternative to voting, lending my voice to verbatim testimonies of World War I soldiers, funny notes, surfacing other great Substacks - I’m all over the place!
5. To pay or not to pay?
I’m haunted by the spectre of simony… the sin of charging for grace. My best Substackery is more inspiration than perspiration. Is it right to charge for something that was given to me? Also, I feel better in myself when I compose and publish regularly. Shouldn’t I be paying my audience? At the same time, I believe that good publishing is the valuable thing. I think it’s immoral to treat cultural output as the ‘loss leader’ whose true purpose is to sell something else - like advertising.
6. What artistic and technical choices have you made?
Artistically, I want to compose fast, publish and respond to the response. I have to risk that it's not as polished as the work I’m used to presenting on stage and screen.
Technically, I want to use every facet of Substack so I’m never advising anyone to do anything I haven’t experienced myself. So I play with composing in app, video, audio and the AI clipping, sharing and read-aloud tools - but also payments, paywalls, discounting, recommendations and restacking.
7. What’s been the effect on your writing?
My use of audio and video is expanding my definition of what writing can be, to the point where I reckon I need a different word to describe what I’m actually doing. Composing? Publishing? Narrowcasting? Substackery? All suggestions are welcome.
8. In it for the long haul?
I’m on a voyage to a brave new world where Substack fulfils the promise of its premise: speaking > printing > recording > broadcasting > cable > streaming > Substack. Will that take a long time, or just a couple more years? I’m fascinated to find out.
Subscribe to :
 | A guest post by
|
I like Substackery. It’s a good word!