Factual Dispatch #64 - It's Happening!

After only about two weeks of paywalling, we…have paid subscribers! And like…more than a dozen of them! Which, is amazing and something I should have done you know, after two years of doing the Tea 4x a week, for an audience of about 120? While doing this for no money is a disaster, paywalling the thing is also a disaster. Over the last decade, high quality commentary is increasingly subscription-walled, while the entirety of the Fox News & FN-adjacent Infotainment Universe is free for consumption by humans, spam bots, and OpenAI to build LLMs with.

As of today, March 6th, certain newsletters will be going out to paid subscribers only, and sections of others will be put behind Le Paywall. My hope is that paid subscribers allow Factual Dispatch to first become sustainable, then to grow to the point where I can give back to journalists, DJs, artists, poets, and even the memelords that create what I curate for you.

Paid subscribers will be getting, in addition to what everyone gets:

• A Sunday Supplement, Easy Like Sunday Morning, containing longform reads, mixes of the week in the form of DJ sets (start sending them in!) and albums, podcasts, and art.

  • If we get enough paid subscribers that want it, another supplement stockpiled with memes, shitposts, and jokes, will be added to the armamentarium! 

• An late night music post, Midnight Music (or whatever title gets settled on), delivering another track, mix, artist, or album that feels thematically appropriate for the week.

• The Poem, Quote, and Vibe of the Week will be put behind the wall, unless they particularly salient for the week. If so, the subscribers will need to suck it up and be good class allies.

• Once we get enough paying subscribers that it won’t just be sad, a Discord should/will be created. This will have topic based channels, and possibly even live coverage of news/stupidity, if allowed. Eventually, thematic playlists of FD music, podcasts, and inserted media will become available for annual subscribers only. Sorry, can’t take the chance that a rapscallion will plunk down for a month, grab the goodies, take off, and live like a Sonic Queen.

VIP subscribers, of which there actually is at least 1 (!!) at time of writing, get all this and more! There are only 10 slots for this tier, to ensure the Klout & Braggadocio that VIPs get, won’t be diluted too much. Besides the undying respect, thanks, and praise anyone willing to go deep in the pocket for FD deserves, they’ll also get:

• A quarterly “presentation” (sorry, the pptx won’t be that spiffy), with data, financials, ideas, and aspirational BS from me while I wear a shirt that has button(s) on it. You might be able to bend the long arc of shitposting towards justice, or you could activist investor the newsletter in an entirely new direction.

• Once the logo is finalized, and a vendor is located, we’re gonna do swag! There’s a specific T-shirt vendor I’m hoping to use, and possibly even trucker hat things? I’m not trying to be modest, but at that level of help, I’ll work extra hard to make it work.

• Unsure what to make of a story? Seen a tweet or post you can’t explain? Send it to me! VIPs will be able to get a Fact Check or “I don’t have time, Research This” 4x a year. I will take time out of my exceedingly busy day, and run down the story. It might take some time, but a report will be generated and delivered, that you can trust*. (*Should you take anything said in these reports as legal, financial, or medical advice? No way!)

  • This is actively being workshopped, and an alternative focused around local news is being evaluated. If you’d like Dispatch to take an active interest in your locality, let me know!

Over time, as the free & paid subscriber count grows, I’d like to expand Afternoon Tea back to more than 1 days a week, similar to the Midnight Music for paid subscribers. And yes, I’m already running the numbers to see how many paid subs are required such that I can drop the price. If you want to be super awesome, fill out the Dispatcher Survey, and help me understand a little about you, and a little about what you want from FD:

There are other surprises to come, it’s all about how much support I can drum up. So, I promise to get out of my shell and do legitimate promotion and marketing of this thing, if you promise to share it with people you know that might dig it. Deal?

One more thing before I go. Why Factual Dispatch? There’s this thing called the Volunteer Factual Dispatch, that shows up a handful of times in the Lemony Snicket books. The Volunteer Fire Department, a group dedicated to putting out fires, real & metaphorical, use the Volunteer Factual Dispatch to transmit information to special machines in an underground network. Sound familiar?

Good things to come, scout’s honor,tn