Thank You

To our readers, listeners, viewers, staff, alumni, investors, and especially our paying members—thank you.

We published our first post five years ago today, October 8, 2019. It was a bit unorthodox, part mission statement, part media criticism, part G-File, part explainer. The headline: “What Are We Doing?”

It’s here if you care to give it a read, but the short version is pretty simple: We’re launching a media company to produce substantive, thoughtful, fact-based reporting and analysis, informed by conservative principles. We promised an approach that centered the fundamentals of traditional journalism—relentless curiosity, ceaseless pursuit of the truth, fierce independence, intellectual honesty—and would be shaped by our understanding of classical liberalism.

There were several things we hoped would set us apart. We wanted to slow down the news, avoiding the temptation to provide the kind of instant analysis that often turns out to be wrong—or at least incomplete—in favor of more reliable reporting. Too many outlets seem determined to win the race to be wrong first. We promised to reject outrage-bait, the popular faux journalism that exploits readers’ anger to increase engagement but sacrifices meaning and understanding. We warned about the rise of partisan boosterism disguised as reporting, with journalists doing the work of political actors and politicians and strategists posing as reporters and disinterested analysts.

We believed passionately in that mission, and we had great conviction that there would be an audience for what we were building. But we really didn’t know whether it would work, and we were honest about that with prospective investors. More than once, we finished our pitch and got a question about the long-term viability of what we were then calling “NewCo.” We were blunt: It’s possible that we’ll fail, but if there’s no market for fact-based reporting and analysis on the right, then there’s much bigger trouble ahead than the prospects of our little startup.

On our first day, we had five people on staff and no office space. We sent our first newsletter—The Morning Dispatch—a couple of times a week, and we didn’t ask anyone to pay us until the calendar rolled into 2020.

A few months after we launched, The Atlantic wrote a story about The Dispatch titled “The Conservatives Trying to Ditch Fake News: The Dispatch wants to sell serious, fact-based stories to the right. But do readers want them?” The piece quoted Mark Hemingway, a veteran of conservative journalism and former colleague of both mine and Jonah’s. He was rather skeptical of our editorial approach: “There’s absolutely zero market for it.”

Well, not exactly.

We’re sending this note to more than 40,000 paying members and more than 500,000 subscribers to our unpaywalled offerings. Our podcasts have built loyal and influential audiences, reaching upwards of 1.5 million people each month. And while we famously don’t care about traffic for traffic’s sake, we have a total readership that far outstrips many outlets on the right still playing the scale game.

And we’re growing. Despite real headwinds in the media industry, we’re adding staff and expanding our operations. We have reporters and editors at our headquarters in Washington, D.C., of course, but also in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Tennessee, Virginia, and Texas. We also have a full-time correspondent based in Tel Aviv.

There’s an audience for what we do because, for five years, we’ve largely kept our promise to provide depth, context, and understanding on the important stories of the day. At the same time, many of the problems we identified in that original post have gotten considerably worse.

There’s nothing new about sensationalism, about media outlets trying to gin up anger and outrage for clicks and attention. But what was once understood as tricks of the trade employed by disreputable tabloids and check-out-line rags now feels inescapable. Once-reputable outlets spend more time trying to rile you up than they do trying to inform you, with predictable results. Is it any wonder so much of our political debate these days consists largely of furious accusations based on spurious information?

At the same time, the blending of journalism and partisan activism is growing. “As party power has diminished, media organizations have moved in to fill the void,” we wrote five years ago. “Many news outlets do the work once properly carried out by the parties: opposition research, ideological messaging, and even political organizing. As a result, much of what passes for political journalism is really party work by proxy.”

It’s gotten worse. Many outlets in this new media environment have abandoned any pretense of disinterested coverage, doing everything from running multimillion-dollar super PACs to organizing door-knocking efforts, all on behalf of candidates they support—or oppose. They are willing to do whatever it takes to advance their team’s candidates, even if it means providing a badly distorted portrayal of reality to their readers, listeners, or viewers. Politicians themselves are also getting in on the act to boost their clout and avoid media gatekeepers, performing for the crowds on social media and launching their own (sometimes very successful) podcasts.

Traditional media outlets still provide lots of good original reporting, but they often seem determined to alienate right-of-center news consumers. Consider the past few weeks. Mainstream outlets fact-checked conservatives for claiming that Kamala Harris was Joe Biden’s border czar—despite having reported exactly that when she was named. Just yesterday, the leadership of CBS News castigated morning anchor Tony Dokoupil for a tough, but entirely fair, interview he conducted with Ta-Nehisi Coates—and then brought in a hard-left DEI trauma guru to help the sensitive souls still upset by the exchange.

The situation isn’t any better on the right. Tucker Carlson—who just held an event with J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee—recently praised Daryl Cooper, a neo-Nazi historian, as “the most important historian in the United States,” after Cooper downplayed Nazi concentration camps and posed with a Nazi-themed coffee mug. As Americans throughout the South are grappling with loss and attempting to rebuild their lives after a devastating hurricane, right-wing media personalities are busy whipping up lies about FEMA preparations and sharing AI-generated political propaganda. Before that, many of those same figures were amplifying entirely fictional claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, in an effort to help GOP figures like Vance advance partisan goals.

We can’t fix this, of course. But what we can offer—and have offered—is an alternative to the persistent progressivism of the mainstream media and the increasingly conspiratorial infotainment world on the right. See this terrific piece from John McCormack on “What Happened to Tucker Carlson?” Or this, by Kevin Williamson, from Springfield, Ohio. We offer fact-checks on misinformation from the left and the right; deeply reported pieces on politics, policy, and culture; intellectually honest commentary and analysis of the 2024 election and its implications; and first-hand reporting from war zones.

This work isn’t cheap. It’s far more costly to produce this kind of high-quality original reporting than it is to pay opinion-slingers looking to piss you off in exchange for some retweets. We have been able to do this work over the past five years because there are tens of thousands of you reading this who believe in our mission enough to support it with your dollars. And for that, you have my sincere gratitude.

We are not done growing, either, and have plans to continue building out our team and expanding our coverage areas in the near future. If you would like to help support our mission further, we hope you’ll consider gifting a membership to friends and family, sponsoring a student membership, or joining us in Washington, D.C., next month for our post-election summit. Looking forward to the next five years and beyond.

Thank you.

Steve Hayes

Co-Founder and CEO