how to turn your favorite substack into a printable newspaper

and inspiration on what you should do with it!

I believe in primarily using the internet to enrich the outernet. I.e. leveraging digital tools and the distributive power of the internet to delight and connect people IRL.

How? With flyers that act as portals to absurd questionnaires, or mysterious phone lines that subvert expectations, or events so ridiculous that people feel compelled to go, and bond with strangers over the absurdity (e.g. Sit Club, Strippers for Charity, The Death Duel to Fix the Ratio).

And I share these projects of mine on Substack. I love Substack. So naturally, I was inspired to make Substack a bit more analog, a bit more whimsical outside its digital bounds.

my Substack as a newspaper!

How?

I made a tool that turns any Substack into a printable newspaper, at substackprint.com. Note that the full functionality only works on desktop (mobile dynamic formatting is hard!) but you can see a preview of the front page on mobile.

With all due humbleness, I'm obsessed with this graphic I made.

Inspiration for what to do with your newspaper.

As a reader:

1. Reduce your screen time. Read without the distraction of all the fast shapes and fun colors and bright lights on your phone.

2. Bring it to read on a flight / car / bus ride.

3. Tuck a folded up copy in your bag, to read while waiting in line, instead of filling downtime with scrolling on your phone.

4. Read performatively in the park or at a coffee shop to pick up baddies.

5. Gift your friends their favorite Substacker’s writing printed as a newspaper.

As a writer:

1. Print out your front page and frame it. Look at it every day and exclaim, “I am a writer!”

2. Bind it with ribbons and leave it around your house for your nosy friends to flip through when they come over.

3. See if local businesses will stock it! Bookstores, coffee shops, anywhere with a waiting room (beauty saloons, dentist offices), community centers, boutique grocery stores, etc.

4. Hang up the front page as a flyer on the street with a “read more at <your publication link>” or a QR code, to promote your Substack to passerby. (À la ryan elizabeth peete).

5. Share your printed & bound newspaper as a gift (works best for family members, close friends, and devoted subscribers).

6. Get creative with print-on-demand. Display your front page on a postcard, blanket, coffee mug, notebook, stickers. Put your articles on a calendar, wrapping paper, tote bag, puzzle.

7. Join forces with other writers, get a table at a craft fair, and sell your newspapers!

But danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁), I don’t have a printer!

• I am a big fan of FedEx printing! That is a good option.

• Most universities and libraries have printers that anyone can use.

• There’s many print-on-demand companies! I’ve used vistaprint before.

• You can get a used printer off Facebook or Nextdoor marketplace, or from a thrift store, for like $20.

Potential future expansions.

I’ll be honest guys, in the four days I made this, I wanted to rage-quit several times.¹ There were many more features I wanted to include, but resigned that I’d add later if there was sufficient interest. Including:

• Combine articles from different Substacks into one newspaper. This was part of the original plan, but it ended up being much more technically complex.²

• Turn a Substack into a printable zine. This is another format I’d love to have! Also, a magazine and book format.

• Customization. Multiple layout options for the front page. The ability to change the font, colors, and divider style.

• More modes! The current modes are normal, evil, Chris Best, and Chris Worst. I wanted to add vintage, modern, kawaii (pink font & background). Evil mode should have red text.

• Fixing the “established” date on the front page. This was supposed to be when the Substack was created. Due to limitations with the RSS feed (see footnotes) it isn’t always accurate.

• Print on demand. Not everyone has a printer, which I often forget, because I’m a flyer fanatic, and heavily scheme via flyer (e.g. organizing Sit Club, promoting the reverse Advice Line, Beancoming the first Beanfluencer, finding love for all my friends). So it’d be cool to hook up some printing API that’d deliver your Substack newspapers to you! It would be especially cool if it could auto-export your subscriptions and saved/archived articles into a newspaper and send it to you.

If there is sufficient interest, I will build these out. But I’m also unsure if Substack HQ will shut me down / snipe the idea, so we’ll see how that pans out.

Enable and join my scheming <3

If you enjoyed the Substack Print, you can support me with a free or paid subscription :) Know that 100% of income from paid subs is funding projects like this! My passion is sparking joy and bringing people together with creative scheming, and I write about my shenanigans here.

The other way you can support my work is to use the Substack Print! Seeing people share their generated newspapers makes me so happy. If you use it, or come up with other use cases for it, I would love to hear about it, so please share!

Love,

danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁)

P.S. I had time to create this because I had a week off work! The other project I created was a tool that lets you type with a font made from Bryan Johnson (the millionaire who’s trying to live forever, notorious for swapping blood with his son). Check that out (if you dare) at livefontever.com.

Write in Bryan Johnsons (I know you’ve been dreaming of this all your life).

1. <rant> After a few frustrating bugs, I had to go to the gym for the sole purpose of letting my anger out. I went through every stage of grief. I’d fix one thing, and two others would break. The code got so complex that I started over four times, but ultimately went back to the original files because the complexity seemed inevitable. It seems so simple, but getting content to flow evenly across columns, not leave “orphaned” titles / images / captions, and just looking GOOD, was very difficult. I spent four hours on footnote formatting alone! </rant>

2. If you’re curious why: Every Substack publication has a RSS feed, which is basically a page that makes it easier for other websites/tools to read its content. It’s common practice for news sites, as it allows external tools to aggregate info from a bunch of different sources, without content getting messed up, and while citing the original source. You can find any Substack’s RSS feed at <publication-name>.substack.com/feed (e.g. rawandferal.substack.com/feed). My tool pulls from a Substack’s RSS feed. This takes processing time. So if I wanted to combine articles from multiple publications, I’d have to pull from multiple Substack RSS feeds, which would take more processing time, and also, RSS feeds generally limit the articles shown by recency and number (e.g. it only shows the last 10 articles and only those published after 2024; I don’t know the actual limits Substack uses, these numbers are just for illustration). So more realistically, if I wanted to combine specific articles across publications into one output newspaper, instead of pulling from the RSS feeds, I’d have to pull content directly from article webpages, which is much less reliable for an external tool to understand and organize. It’s possible, just much more complex.