As you know, we at The Downballot pride ourselves on cranking out the Morning Digest every weekday, 240 times a year. Except for federal holidays and a short break between Christmas and New Year’s, we never miss a day.
Unfortunately, two extenuating circumstances hit our small shop at the same time: Jeff Singer just moved to a new apartment (don’t worry, Boston—you haven’t gotten rid of him just yet!), and I’m recovering from reconstructive knee surgery a week ago, which has sharply curtailed the hours I can work. Even though we knew in advance that this convergence was approaching, it still meant we couldn’t prepare a Digest for today.
This is the single biggest difficulty we face as a two-man crew: We have zero slack. If one of us is out, the other must work twice as hard—and if both of us must be out, then no work can happen at all. We’ve always tried very hard to avoid the latter, but when your lease is up, and your orthopedist says you can’t put off surgery for your torn ACL, you’ve simply got to take the day off from publishing.
This is why my hope next year is to add a third person to our team. It would make The Downballot much more robust, and we’d be able to bring you even more of the elections coverage you love. And the good news is, we’re now very close to reaching the break-even point, which would allow us to consider what that third hire might look like.
But we’re also facing a problem that cropped up at this time last year: subscriber churn on the occasion of our anniversary. Roughly a third of our paid subscribers signed up right around the time we first launched two years ago. As a result, whenever that date comes around again, we invariably lose a sizable chunk of folks, including some who’ve gotten new credit cards but just haven’t updated their data.
You can see the recent spike (because readers wanted to upgrade before our rate increase earlier this month) and then the subsequent drop-off. It’s a real bummer because we gained 100 paid subscribers at the start of August, only to shed around 80 since our anniversary—with more falloff likely to come.
If you’re in a position where you can help us recover from this downturn by upgrading to a paid subscription, we’d be incredibly grateful. There’s simply nothing else like The Downballot, and we want to be able to keep publishing come hell or high water. You’d be doing us an incredible service by putting us on the path to greater resiliency.
If you instead prefer to donate to us, you can give on our ActBlue page. We never, ever share your information unless required by law.
We look forward to the Morning Digest hitting your inboxes again tomorrow.
Thank you so much,
David Nir, Publisher
Best wishes for your recovery, David. Surgery is always a shock to the system, even when it helps heal a longstanding problem. As for Jeff, I hope you can find your coffeemaker and other essentials amid the unpacking.
Hope your recovery goes well. Take rest. We’ll read you tomorrow.