Dear Revealers,

After much deliberation, we have decided to move the newsletter from Substack to Ghost. You will no doubt have some questions about the change, so let’s answer a few of them:

Oh no! Ghost sounds scary! What happens to my subscription? And to the three-and-a-half years’ worth of features, reviews, and other posts in the archives?

Nothing at all. Your subscription will port over seamlessly from Substack to Ghost and newsletters will arrive in your inbox just as they always have. Through Ghost’s concierge service, all of our posts have made the transition, too, and your access to the archive will be unchanged. See? Not scary at all.

What if I prefer to access the newsletter through my browser? Where do I go now?!

We have purchased a new, easy-to-remember custom URL:

http://thereveal.film

If your friends ask you about your favorite film site online, all you have to say is, “The Reveal dot film.” We’re far from the days of Geocities blogs here.

What does this mean for the community functions available to paid subscribers, like commenting privileges and chat?

The bad news is that comments on previously published posts will not port over from Substack to Ghost, though newsletters published before our departure (and the comments) will still reside at Substack. Paid subscribers can, of course, comment on our Ghost posts just as you were doing at Substack. As with most other aspects of this move, nothing has changed.

As for chat, we have really enjoyed the addition of a subscriber chat on the Substack app, which has led to fun discussions, a “What did you watch this weekend” thread, and even a New York meet-up. We love our community and want to give you the chance to continue to speak in real time about movies. To that end, we will have a Discord for paid subscribers and send out an email with access information shortly. Discord offers a lot more features and versatility than Substack’s chat function, and we want to build a bigger community for our readers. We don’t plan on being strangers there ourselves.

Why are we doing this?

When we launched our Substack in October 2021, we had the good fortune to win support from the company, which offered us a contract to give us financial security while we grew our subscription base in addition to resources for a first-rate editor (Alan Scherstuhl) and graphic designer (Mike Renaud). We remain grateful for their enthusiasm for the project and their expertise in advising us on the many technical and strategic questions we had throughout the process. We wanted to reward their faith in The Reveal as much as we could.

However.

There are two basic reasons for our departure:

1. Though we have a lot of other freelance outlets, The Reveal belongs to us. For hosting the site, Substack takes 10% off the top. Ghost charges a hosting fee based on the number of total subscribers. The difference between those two numbers is considerable. We are not greedy people, but we want The Reveal to be sustainable many, many years into the future and this move ensures we can.

2. We have been uncomfortable with some of the decisions Substack has made internally about the types of voices it accepts and elevates. Back in December 2023, we joined a number of publishers in pushing an open letter to the company about the extremists it was platforming and monetizing, as reported most prominently in Jonathan M. Katz’s Atlantic piece “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.” The response from the company’s co-founder, Hamish McKenzie, was a significant disappointment to us. We understand, from our earliest days in the trenches of the A.V. Club comment boards, that content moderation is an extremely complicated issue and impossible to do perfectly. Indeed, when we posted the open letter, we got a range of responses from commenters, including a few who did not want Substack to bend to the pressure we were applying.

And yet in the time since, there’s been too much evidence of Substack’s complicity in platforming far-right extremism. We have heard from many cinephiles who refuse to subscribe to The Reveal due to its Substack connection and we have witnessed many examples of writers and friends who have felt marginalized or attacked due to the company’s editorial priorities and policies. The bottom line: Substack has made its choices. We have now made ours.

What can I expect from The Reveal in the future?

A lot. We have been creative partners for almost our entire careers, built on creating a community of thoughtful film lovers. That’s never changed for us, and that we want to give our readers as much bang for their buck as possible. Newsletter subscriptions are expensive, adding to whatever other subscriptions you might have for other digital publications, streaming platforms, wellness apps, or whatever. We want to make sure you’re getting good value every week and we want to continue to be ambitious in building out the newsletter, including some exciting new features slated to launch soon.

Ghost will give us a level of independence we have never had before—and, all things considered, we have enjoyed more than our share at The A.V. Club and The Dissolve—and we intend to keep pushing ourselves long into the future. At our current pace of one entry every three weeks, our Sight and Sound Top 100 conversation project alone will take another three-and-a-half years to complete, so consider that a promise that we’re not going anywhere.

Finally, it bears mentioning that this move is not without some risks. More than ever, we’ll be dependent on word-of-mouth and paid subscriptions. If you like The Reveal, tell your friends. And tell them to tell their friends. If you’re currently a free subscriber, please consider purchasing a paid subscription. We'll always have content that’s free, but we give our subscribers our best work — and that’s something you don’t want to miss.

Something to remember: Platforms are platforms. Substack never owned the newsletter and neither will Ghost. The Reveal is ours. The Reveal is yours. We may be moving to a new home, but we’re keeping the occupants.

And now we can get back to the business of talking about movies. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow!

—Scott and Keith