A Thank You and an Update for Our Members

Dear Members,

Let us begin with an enthusiastic thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your feedback. Thank you for sharing your enthusiasm about The Dispatch with your friends. And, most important, thank you for your early support of our work.

Today, we’re entering the next stage of our plan, by adding new membership options and restricting more of our work to members only. We thought we’d take the opportunity to provide you with an update and a preview of what’s to come.

We had great hopes more than a year ago, when we first started to imagine a new media company. We knew we wanted to provide an alternative to the outrage-driven opinion slinging that has become so prevalent in journalism today. We knew we wanted a business model that didn’t depend on monetizing clicks and anger and all of the bad incentives that brings. We wanted to build a more direct relationship with our readers and listeners by delivering much of our work directly to you—“pushed content,” in publishing jargon—and to create a community that might provide an alternative to the sewage that often passes through modern social media. We believed strongly that there was an audience for the kind of fact-driven reporting and commentary that we’d put at the center of our plans.