An Offer You Can Refuse

Dear Dispatch Readers:

I’m writing today with a really good offer—an opportunity to try a full membership to The Dispatch for free for one month. At some point over the last year, you signed up to receive our free emails—and we’re thrilled that you did. We hope you’ve found The Dispatch to be the reliable, trustworthy source of news and information that we’ve worked hard to provide.

And if you have, I’d like to remind you that there’s more available to you by joining as a paid member. So, as we head into the final two months of the 2020 election cycle with all of the intensity it will bring, we’re offering our freelisters—as we affectionately call you—the opportunity to try us out for a month, risk free.

The world is confusing. Our politics is chaos. Social media is an incubator of outrage and an amplifier of conspiracy. For the average news consumer, it’s never been easier to access information and never been harder to determine the truth. And all too often, the people we turn to in order to help us understand it all have hidden ideological agendas or serve as partisan water carriers.

The Dispatch is different.

We’re building a new kind of media company. It’s member-focused, ad-free. We’re transparent about our approach and intellectually honest in our reporting and analysis. We bring you news, but also the important context that helps you understand it.

We hope that you’ll let us be your trusted guide through the chaos and uncertainty of these challenging times.

We believe in being straight with our readers and members—in our editorial work and in our approach to the business of journalism. That’s why you’ll never—under any circumstances—find one of those boxes of clickbaity fake news on our website or in our newsletters. You know the ones—you find them on virtually every other news and politics website. Miracle vitamins, salacious teases featuring scantily clad actresses, “sure-thing” stock tips, ominous warnings about coming disaster. There’s a reason they’re popular. They make money. Sometimes a lot of it. But it’s almost all B.S.—or at least highly misleading.

We’ll never ask you to trust our editorial judgment while simultaneously trying to deceive you into monetizable clicks.  

So, we’re not going to hype this offer. It’s not “an offer you can’t refuse” and it’s nowhere near an offer that’s “too good to be true.” There’s no fine print, no hidden deal proposed by pricing consultants, no slippery sales language. It’s just a good offer.

It’s simple: Sign up today for an annual membership to The Dispatch and you’ll get a month for free to determine if we’re worth it. If we’re not, cancel anytime—no obligation and no hard feelings. We’ll be happy to have you continue reading the great work we provide for free to non-members.

The cost of an annual membership is $100. (Not $99, not $99.99.) We think it’s worth it. Here’s why.

By becoming a paid member, you’ll have access to all of the editorial content we publish. Everything. Our written work is produced by a team of curious, knowledgeable, and careful journalists for busy people who can’t spend all day just trying to keep up with the news. We don’t write for fellow journalists or D.C. insiders, even if we count many top journalists, policymakers, political strategists and elected leaders among our loyal readers. (In just the past few weeks, Chris Wallace, Jake Tapper, and Karl Rove have pointed to The Dispatch as a key part of their daily news diet.) We produce reporting and analysis that’s substantive, straightforward and accessible, avoiding D.C. jargon and political gossip. Instead, we focus our efforts on things that are going to matter in six weeks, six months, six years.

As a member, you’ll have access to everything we publish, including the work we share only with members. More of The Morning Dispatch and the G-File. More French Press. The Sweep, our election-focused newsletter. Vital Interests on national security and the world. And our newest newsletter, launching today, Capitolism—offering a deeper look at economic issues and trends in language we can all understand.

But—and this is important—you control what you get from us. We give you access to it all but you decide what we send. One of our primary objectives—and one of the reasons we founded the company—was to help our members streamline their news consumption and declutter their inboxes. And we know from our current members that this is one of the things they value most about their membership.

Okay, okay—that’s enough. I can get carried away when I start in on what we’re doing and what makes us different.

Bottom line: We’re glad you’re reading our work. We’re happy to make you this good offer. You can refuse it—with no hard feelings—but we’d love to welcome you as a full member of The Dispatch.

Onward,

Steve Hayes