Hey fam, I want to give you a miniature state-of-The-Bulwark today.
First up: Catherine Rampell launches her newsletter, Receipts, tonight. I’m pretty excited. She’s one of my favorite writers and getting to read her work under our banner instead of coming out of someone else’s shop is gratifying to me. I hope it is for you, too—because you’re the reason she’s here.
And that’s the core of what I want to talk about today: How you built this thing with us and where we’re going next. I hope you’ll indulge me with a brief history lesson, for all the new kids.
At our first Bulwark editorial meeting there were five, maybe six, people sitting in a corner we rented from someone else’s office. We had four cubicles. That was the operation.
This Monday we had our weekly staff meeting and there were four brand-new people just on that call. I couldn’t even tell you how many people work at The Bulwark these days without looking it up or asking someone. The pace of growth has been, for me at least, dizzying.
I want to be sure you understand that you are the reason for this growth. You built this operation.
When we first started, we were a nonprofit. We had some big institutional donors who generously floated us. But in pretty short order, readers started sending us donations all on their own. We didn’t ask for them. We literally never asked for donations. But people started reading and listening to us and they wanted to be part of it, so they dug around on their own, found a DonorBox page someone had set up for us, and just started sending us money. Five bucks; twenty bucks; a hundred bucks.
It was crazy.
In short order we decided to see if we could transition from being supported by institutional donors to being supported purely by small-dollar donors. So we set up a Substack and created a membership program.
The response was so insane that it created a problem: We had too many members giving us too much money. We couldn’t stay as a nonprofit. So we gave up our nonprofit status and became an honest-to-God media company.
More people kept joining and as our revenues grew, we reinvested that money into The Bulwark, hiring new voices and creating new products.
We’ve always been a different sort of media company. A short list of things that are odd about us:
We charge money for memberships but put very few products behind a paywall.
We give free memberships to anyone who wants to join but can’t afford it. We’re grateful to our paying Bulwark+ members for making this possible.
We are infinitely more interested in saving democracy than increasing revenue.
Another odd thing about us is that we don’t have an exit strategy. We didn’t design The Bulwark to be acquired by someone else.
We designed it to be a real movement, that meant something to real people. We designed it to serve you.
We have a community of hundreds of thousands of people who built this thing of ours with us. We’re going to keep building with them.
Every hire we’ve made has been done with an eye toward serving our members. And that’s why Catherine Rampell is here. She’s going to defend liberal democracy and she’s going to make you smarter about economics while she does it.
She won’t tell you what you want to hear and she won’t engage in kabuki theater. She will simply report the things she believes to be true.
We brought Catherine over from the Washington Post, which is currently bleeding out in full view of the public. The first person we took from the Post was Will Sommer, whose False Flag newsletter on the inner workings of MAGA has been an enormous hit.
A place like the Post could never publish Will’s newsletter. In part because the Post is an appendage of Jeff Bezos’s larger business interests, but also because the Post—like most traditional media—believes it is beholden to Both Sides, even when one of the sides has become an authoritarian personality cult driven by cranks and grifters.
Mark Hertling joined The Bulwark this week, too. A retired U.S. Army lieutenant general, Mark has been a friend for some time, but had previously been part of CNN. He’s Team Bulwark now—a new reason to check the homepage for his analysis. I wish we could have him just as an expert on military affairs, but I fear that before long it will be his insights into civil-military relations that become critical for understanding American politics.
That’s how we use the resources our members entrust to us. We figure out what’s going to be important and then find people who can make us smarter. That’s why we brought in Adrian Carrasquillo, whose reporting on immigration has been sensational. It’s why we brought in Jonathan Cohn, who has an uncanny ability to explain policy and government clearly. It’s why we brought in Lauren Egan, to understand how the Democratic party is adapting to the moment. It’s why Sarah keeps running those focus groups. The point isn’t rage-bait, or resistance clicks, or political positioning, or ideological flattery. Everything we do is oriented toward creating value for the members who have built The Bulwark alongside us.
A few weeks ago Sarah sat for an interview with a business-of-media podcast and the host kept asking her about The Bulwark’s “exit strategy.” His assumption seemed to be, “Why are you really doing this? Aren’t you afraid that people only see you as a Never Trump outfit? How are you going to cash out?”
It was like they were speaking two different languages. This guy couldn’t conceive of a new media venture as anything but a pump-and-dump: Blitz scale, flatter the right billionaire, and get out with your Scrooge McDuck money.
Sarah kept patiently explaining that we don’t have an exit strategy—we have a growth strategy. That strategy is simple: We have a community of hundreds of thousands of people who built this thing of ours with us. We’re going to keep building with them.
There’s a reason Sarah does these interviews and not me. Because if it had been me, I would have explained that our “exit strategy” is to crush the compromised, desiccated old media because this moment requires something better.
They have a milkshake. Our community has a straw.
And so we drink their milkshake. Together. You want to know about our exit strategy?
Saving democracy is our exit strategy.
So that’s the state of The Bulwark. I trust you’ll welcome Catherine Rampell and Mark Hertling. And if you’d like to stick in your straw and help us build the next phase of The Bulwark, I hope you’ll consider joining us, right now:
Thanks for bearing with my self-indulgence. I’ll be around in the comments, as always, to answer questions. Nothing but love for you, fam.
Best,
JVL
P.S. If you’d like to help further fuel our growth and fund free subscriptions for others, consider upgrading to a Founding Membership. We have a virtual Founders Town Hall planned for November 17 and we’d love to have you there. Upgrade now.