The State of the Bulwark

America is forked. But our community is strong.

Hey fam.

Some things are changing at The Bulwark and I want to brief you about them since this community belongs to all of us.

The big change is: We’re growing.

Yesterday I mentioned that Will Sommer is joining us and he’ll be bringing his reporting expertise and focusing on the fringe conservative elements that are now running the federal government. His newsletter, False Flag, will launch soon.

You’ve already met Lauren Egan, who is standing up a newsletter called The Opposition reporting on what’s happening with the Democratic party during their time in the wilderness. We think this is important because right now the Democratic party is the only vehicle that exists for harnessing political power to push back against the authoritarian takeover. Lauren’s first edition will hit your inbox this Sunday evening. Be sure to look for it.

You’ve also met Adrian Carrasquillo, whose newsletter Huddled Masses has focused like a laser on what’s actually happening with the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

And we’ve got another new hire who we’ll announce next week. (Sorry.) I’ll just say that I’m super excited about this writer. You are probably already familiar with him and his brief will be explaining complicated policy stuff. He’s going to add a ton of value.

We’ve been able to add these products because of you. Full stop.

Here’s something funny: Almost exactly a year ago I had an exchange with my colleague Adam Keiper—he’s the editor behind the scenes who makes everything happen. We were talking about the extraordinary growth we’d seen in 2023. I cautioned him not to expect much more of it, because we’d never be able to get more than 50,000 paid Bulwark+ members.¹

In a couple days we’re going to pass 90,000 Bulwark+ members.

I know. It’s crazy. But we’re taking your support and pushing it right back into The Bulwark to deliver more value to the community.

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By now I assume you’ve noticed that we’ve been growing in the video space, too.

Our YouTube channel is over a million followers now, which is nothing short of amazing.² YouTube has turned out to be an important platform for us because (1) It allows us to push the pro-democracy mission to an entirely new audience of people who are not primarily readers; and (2) It’s created a new revenue stream to broaden our resource pool.

Our podcasts continue to dominate—Tim’s flagship show is consistently one of the highest rated politics podcasts in the country. The George and Sarah show does huge numbers. The Next Level and Mona’s new show are growing. But the biggest development in the podcast space for us is that the line between podcast and video has been erased. We now think about them as a single category: broadcast products.

We’ve succeeded in broadcast media in ways I never thought possible. And like everything else, that’s because of you. You gave us the resources to experiment with this medium and then leverage our successes.

For those of you who like to read and watch your politics, we now house all the short form videos that Tim, Sam and others produce daily for YouTube under Bulwark+ Takes on the site. For Bulwark+ members this is where you can watch ad-free and also find exclusive stuff, like live event archives and my pop-up show WTF 2.0 that I’ve been doing on the Substack app.

If you’d rather listen than watch (like me), you can add the Bulwark+ Takes feed to your podcast player by going here. (Just click Set Up.)

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There are some other changes. We’re doing some rejiggering to find space for all of those new newsletters I talked about at the top.³

This has meant reconfiguring Jim Swift’s Overtime.

I know! I’m very sad about this. But the reality is that there are only so many newsletters we can deliver in a given week before they start cannibalizing one another. (See footnote #3.)

Overtime has been with The Bulwark since Day 1. Now it’s going to be reconfigured as a weekend product. It’ll still be Jim, but the newsletter itself will evolve into a weekly roundup. A comfy Saturday morning read.

The two good things to come from this are (1) It makes space for those other new newsletters. And (2) It frees up some of Jim’s time to do other stuff. Like this sensational piece of reporting on a 27-year-old man from Ohio whose life is in danger because of what’s happening to the federal government.

So in the end the community will get more of Jim (yay!), just less of him in your email inbox (boo!).

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Which brings me to the last agenda item: A reminder that you can control your personal Bulwark email preferences.

Each one of you has an account page where you can update your email preferences. You can do this as often as you like and we can’t actually see what you choose to have emailed and what you skip.

As a Bulwark+ member you get access to everything we publish on the website—but email delivery can be on your terms. Plus, you also can use the free Substack mobile app if that’s your thing.

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So that’s it. That’s the state of The Bulwark.

Again: Thank you. None of this is possible without your support. You’re the reason we can keep adding new voices and bringing you more reporting.

You’re the reason we can give free subscriptions to anyone who asks, even if they can’t afford to pay.

You’re the reason that we can say what we really think, without having to bend to corporate pressure.

You’re the reason that this mission became our community.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you. And feel free to discuss any/all of this in the comments. I’ll try to be present today and answer questions as I can.

—JVL

Who loves you? This guy! (Photo by Hannah Yoest, who is the greatest ever, period, the end.)

1. I believe my exact words to him were: “Get 50,000 subscribers out of your head right now. Because that is never going to happen.”

2. Barry, Chris, Sebastian, Jamie, Rupert, Noah, Colin—you guys are unbelievable.

3. This may be more information than you want but:

• With newsletter delivery we have to be careful about not overwhelming subscribers’ inboxes.

• This means spacing product delivery out with time buffers between email sends.

• Realistically, a week can only accommodate the delivery of so many newsletters before they start cannibalizing one another.

• One of our most important tasks is managing this schedule to optimize the value each product can deliver for our audience.