“This is the Wild West,” the columnist tells VF. “What I’m doing on Substack, nobody else is doing.”
The late designer let him in on her secret: She had tucked an issue of the National Enquirer inside the more highbrow glossy. Two decades later, Shuter is using his Substack , Naughty but Nice, to capitalize on the eternal appetite for the sort of outrageously lowbrow material once only found in the pages of gossip rags like the Enquirer.
“I went to Substack to have a tabloid,” Shuter said last week as he sipped a glass of wine at Bottino, the Chelsea art world haunt next door to his home. “And the reason I knew I was going to be successful is all of my really smart friends read the gossip first.
” In his PR days, Shuter wrote the statement announcing Jennifer Lopez’s first breakup from Ben Affleck—and placed a Page Six story that led socialite Zeta Graff to file a defamation suit against Paris Hilton that was settled out of court—before cycling through a string of celebrity hosting and journalism gigs. Now he publishes three howling dispatches a day.
Last week’s headlines included “EXCLUSIVE: MEGHAN MARKLE BOYCOTTS NBC AFTER ‘AMERICAN TERRORIST’ SNL SLAM” and “EXCLUSIVE: BLAKE LIVELY THINKS THERE’S STILL HOPE WITH TAYLOR SWIFT AFTER LEGAL DRAMA ENDS. ” At 52 years old, he feels he’s hitting his stride.
“This is the Wild West,” Shuter told me. “This is a new world. What I’m doing on Substack, nobody else is doing. ” We were speaking the day after the Met Gala, which Shuter said he covered by gleaning intel from friendly reporters that more reputable outlets might consider unpublishable.
“They could never say ‘this one held her purse’ or ‘this one was a bitch,’” he said with a characteristic grin. “So they just text me and I can say it. ” His editorial process is at once militaristically consistent and freewheelingly open-ended: Some of his media sources, Shuter said, have the password to his Substack and can go in and write up their own copy, which they do free of charge. As far as fact-checking goes, The New Yorker this is not. Much of Shuter’s output is unfalsifiable. Who besides Katy Tur herself could say whether she was truly “mortified” by Vanity Fair’s Tony Dokoupil profile? And while Shuter’s report about Ryan Reynolds begging Lively, his wife, to resolve her lawsuit against Justin Baldoni is not unbelievable given their recent settlement, his April “exclusive” that Donald Trump was eyeing replacements for Karoline Leavitt has not borne much fruit.
Shuter is not bothered by such pesky details.
“Say I got a wrong person hooking up on Summer House,” he said. “I don’t want to be wrong, but it doesn’t matter. ” Though the writing is proudly frivolous, and the details often unsubstantiated, he sees it as a very serious enterprise.
“This is real reporting that The Washington Post would do,” Shuter insisted. “It is cloaked in Liberace’s cape,” he said. “It is camp, but it is quality reporting. ” Naughty but Nice began about a year ago as a way for Shuter to market his new novel, It Started With a Whisper.
It seems the move paid off. Not only did the book briefly become one of Amazon’s top 200 bestsellers, but he now has some 7,000 unpaid and paid subscribers, plus a deal for two more novels. While he claims he didn’t initially realize he could monetize his output, he estimates he’s now able to make close to $8,000 a month—enough to pay his Chelsea rent.
In recent months, he’s captured the attention of new and traditional media, making appearances on Megyn Kelly’s podcast and Good Morning America. His dispatches on Nicki Minaj’s Met Gala standing, Prince William’s plans while King Charles was in the US, and Barron Trump’s accent have been cited by the likes of the Daily Mail and Cosmopolitan, among others.
These other websites are “fishing around the web each day for content,” he said.
“And I provide delicious content. ” Still, Shuter argues that he’s the first to offer Substack’s version of the National Enquirer, which is perhaps better known for its conspiracy theories and catch-and-kill schemes than for its real scoops about John Edwards’s extramarital affair and Rush Limbaugh’s OxyContin addiction. Unlike other celebrity-gossip newsletters, his publishes material that isn’t aggregated from other outlets but is based on original reporting—or at least his version of it. The platform, he said with visible satisfaction, “should be horrified that I’m going to be successful. ” 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 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 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.
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