Rob Shuter Wants His Gossipy Substack to Be the National Enquirer of Our Era
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 …
