Seamus Hughes launched his publication Court Watch on Substack in 2022, covering interesting and overlooked court records. He chose Substack because it was easy to use. As a freelancer, he didn’t want to spend time and money setting up a website; he just wanted to write and get his work to people interested in it.

But Hughes, a counterterrorism and extremism researcher at the University of Nebraska, became increasingly uncomfortable about the existence of white nationalist and Nazi content on the platform. When Substack competitor Beehiiv announced its own Media Collective to support independent journalists in November, Hughes applied and was almost immediately accepted.

Beehiiv’s Media Collective — which Beehiiv says will support somewhere between 20 and 40 journalists for up to two years each — provides monthly health insurance stipends; some legal support; access to Perplexity Pro, Getty Images, and accounting software Doola; and additional technical and business support. Beehiiv’s monthly hosting charges (starting at $39/month for a publication with 1,000 subscribers) are also waived for collective members. (Unlike Substack, Beehiiv doesn’t take a cut of users’ subscription revenue.)

The Media Collective is Beehiiv’s first program to specifically support journalists. Beehiiv is committing “several million dollars” to the initiative, according to the announcement. COO Preeya Goenka declined to share an exact number but described the costs for providing legal services, health insurance, and software access as “a sizeable investment.”

Most of the writers for the inaugural cohort have been selected, though Goenka told me there are a few spots left. Cohort members so far include Hughes, media reporter Oliver Darcy, Canadian journalist Catherine Herridge, and Garbage Day newsletter author Ryan Broderick. Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk — who started his newsletter business career at Morning Brew — came up with the idea for the collective, he said, after a conversation in which Darcy explained to him the challenges of going solo as a journalist.

“I knew that we wanted more people like Oliver using Beehiiv, but these were real problems that needed to be addressed,” Denk wrote in his own newsletter, hosted on Beehiiv, about the collective.

For Hughes, the promised legal support was a major draw and something he wasn’t getting from Substack. Beehiiv will cover up to eight hours of legal advice per month, Hughes said. The November post describes the legal support as “access to pre-publication legal review and Errors & Omissions (E&O) coverage.” Goenka said Beehiiv will provide Media Collective members with the pre-publication review, but is partnering with an external law firm for other legal services, including litigation.

“If somebody doesn’t like what I wrote — which happens quite a bit — I’m going to be holding the bag as a freelance journalist,” Hughes said. “I didn’t want to kick a hornet’s nest and not have anyone having my back.”

Beehiiv is not the first publishing platform to try to lure independent journalists onto its turf. Substack has launched a slew of support programs for writers over the years (the Substack Fellowship for Independent Writers, Substack Grow, Substack Defender, and Substack Local). In 2021, Substack Pro paid a lump sum upfront to established writers like Matt Yglesias and Daniel Lavery in exchange for keeping 85% of the revenue they generated in their first year.

Of those programs, Substack Defender is the only one that remains. “The goal of these programs has been to demonstrate the value of the Substack model and show that it could work for many types of writers,” a spokesperson for the company told me. “The programs have worked, and now many of these publishers are succeeding on Substack and growing through the network features.”

Ghost — a nonprofit open-source software that allows independent publishers to create, grow, and monetize their publications in one place — licenses its technology to journalists so they can own the platform that their work is on. It currently doesn’t offer business or legal support, though it has partnered with the Tiny News Collective. Monthly pricing starts at $31/month for a publication with up to 1,000 members, with no cut from subscription revenue. Publications like Hell Gate NYC, Casey Newton’s Platformer, and 404 Media are using Ghost.

Meta’s newsletter platform, Bulletin, shut down in 2022 after just a year. It was an invite-only platform for writers (many of whom were already high-profile media figures like Malala Yousafzai, Tan France, and Malcolm Gladwell) to publish paid subscription newsletters. Meta tried to lure writers to Bulletin with offers to pay local journalists licensing fees and the fact that it didn’t take a cut from writers’ subscriptions.

These types of programs are likely to continue to come and go, as the needs of journalists and the platforms’ businesses evolve.

“I’m very appreciative of the platform that [Substack] gave me for a few years,” Hughes said. “But I got a sense they were creating their own echo chamber. It felt like if I kept on Substack, the future of Court Watch would be entirely tied to the future of Substack. That was a little concerning to me. As I got more and more paid subscribers, it became really cost prohibitive to [stay]. They take a 10% cut on the subscriptions off the top, which is great when you have 10 or 15 paid subscribers. But where I’m now at [with 475 paid subscribers], the numbers don’t start adding up very quickly on that.”

This story has been updated to include comments from Beehiiv.