The platform, he said with visible satisfaction, “should be horrified that I’m going to be successful.” (“Ultimately, people decide what resonates by subscribing to those they want to hear from, and Rob has clearly found an audience!” a Substack representative told me. “He’s currently #43 Rising in Culture, and hundreds of people pay for his Substack, which speaks to the connection he’s built with his community.”)
Despite the boasts, Shuter has an air of good cheer that makes him hard to resent. “You could write a gossip column about you or me,” his friend Elvis Duran, the longtime Z100 radio host, said, “and you could make it nice or mean, and he always makes it nice.” On this point, opinions may vary—it depends what one makes of a headline like “EXCLUSIVE: MEGHAN MARKLE’S NEW ASTROLOGY OBSESSION IS NOW RUNNING HER LIFE.” “Publicists are still not sure what to do with Substack,” Shuter said, but he has admittedly run afoul of some of them with his coverage. One is Matthew Hiltzik, CEO of communications firm Hiltzik Strategies, whose clients have ranged from Justin Bieber and Alec Baldwin to Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton. Hiltzik pushed back on the tone of a story that Shuter published about Kelly Ripa—though Shuter professed not to remember which one—leading Shuter to soften his approach to the talk show host.
As a general matter, Hiltzik told me, navigating the new-media waters, however murky, is part of the job. “We are big believers in free markets and the marketplace of ideas,” he said. “Ideally, those who are more consistently credible will have a greater consumption, but it doesn’t always work out that way.”
After growing up in working-class Birmingham, England, Shuter came to America in his 20s “delusionally ambitious” and “delusionally confident,” determined to reinvent himself in a celebrity milieu—he started out as a receptionist at a PR firm. “I became a little bit of a character,” he said, “which is not a lie. And this goes back to my Substack. It’s never a lie. It’s always based on the truth. Do I whip [stories] up into a frenzy, and am I Barnum? Yes, but Barnum didn’t make stuff up. He whooshed stuff up—there’s a difference.” He had learned in the earlier days of that mission how the reporting process could work: When the National Enquirer helped break the (true) story of Jessica Simpson’s entanglement with John Mayer, he asked Simpson, his client, how the tabloid got the intel. “She said a UPS guy came to the house to drop off a package,” Shuter recalled, “and John answered the door half naked.”
After Shuter and I parted ways, his third missive of the day arrived in my inbox. “EXCLUSIVE: BRITNEY SPEARS LEFT REHAB EARLY,” the subject line read, “AND INSIDERS SAY NOTHING HAS REALLY CHANGED.” A representative for the singer didn’t return a request for comment.