We’ve Come a Long Way
Greetings from Ohio. Overtime readers will know that I just spent a week moving my family from Virginia to my home state. Amazingly, it turns out some of my new neighbors are Bulwark readers. Imagine that—I moved 475 miles away from Washington, D.C. and still found our people.
When we bought our first house in 2019, there weren’t many readers for us to live near. The Bulwark was brand new. Sarah Longwell had to write a letter to my credit union to tell them the site was a going concern and that I had a real job. I had to explain what The Bulwark was to my new neighbors.
In the early days, four of us (the Weekly Standard alumni contingent: JVL, Hannah, Andrew, and me) sat in a little cubicle we rented from Sarah’s firm. Occasionally during podcast recordings, the foam panels would fall off the wall of our makeshift studio. Our media operation sometimes felt like it ran on several tin cans and some string.
We also didn’t all know each other at the start. JVL and Sarah started The Secret Podcast as an icebreaker, with the further benefit of being able to offer something to the people who donated money in those early days. Now they are best friends, and our members listen to the Secret Podcast from all over the world.
Since those early days, our audience has grown from a few thousand to nearly a million engaged subscribers and followers across our newsletter, podcast, and YouTube platforms. In a time of rapid media company launches and even faster crashes, we prioritized steady, reliable growth on a strong foundation. We have always been after people, not “eyeballs” or “clicks” or “web traffic.” That’s because we’re building a real community that values democracy and the good-faith exchange of ideas. We don’t always agree with one another—just look at the comments on your average Triad or Morning Shots—but when disagreements emerge, they come from a good place, and we all end up stronger and smarter for them.
Speaking of getting smarter: Our growth has made it possible for us to add people to our team who are raising the level of our newsletters, podcasts, articles, and videos every day. I was hired as employee #6; today we have nearly 40 people on staff, with recent additions including Marc Caputo, whose MAGAville newsletter is appointment reading for anyone who wants to know what’s going on in Trump World, and Sam Stein, who came from Politico to become our managing editor.
Bulwark+ members have made all of this possible through their monthly and annual memberships. These memberships are the reason we’re able to keep most of what we produce free and available to the widest possible audience. And our founding members give even more because they believe in our mission. Their support makes it possible for us to do many things, including giving away subscriptions to folks who like what we do but can’t afford to pay for it themselves.
JVL says it often: We’re a mission-oriented organization first and a business second.
But really, The Bulwark is a community. I try to call one reader a day who has a question, a concern, or a problem. I talk to probably 50 readers a day via email or chat, regardless of whether they’re free subscribers, Bulwark+ members, or folks who aren’t even on our email list.
We would love for you to join our community and support our mission to elevate pro-democracy voices in a media landscape dominated by noise from the political extremes.
Right now, we’re running a sale on new memberships. It’s a rare one: $80 for the next year. That’s 20% off our base price, which hasn’t changed in five years even though our output today far exceeds what we were able to produce when we started. (I can’t keep up with it all sometimes, and I work here!)
No matter how you found us, we hope you find a home here at The Bulwark. Over these past five years, many of our members have become like extended family. One reader, who is retiring, just emailed me to offer us some of his historic print magazine archive. (He knows we’re magazine people.) Another, reading that I just moved back to Ohio, offered to meet up at a pub for a cold beverage or a 5-way chili. Turns out, he went to the same small college here as my dad. I’m realizing that no matter where we move, we’ll keep finding our people.
The Bulwark is that kind of place.
—Jim