……rests on the foundation of an educated electorate.”
That’s a line from Thomas Jefferson, and it’s also the title of my new newsletter. Its purpose is to showcase the best political journalism I can find.
This means you won’t see horse-race or both-sides BS. No poll stories, either. Just the good stuff, the meaningful stuff.
It’s journalism that illuminates what’s at stake, what the candidates say they’ll do, and who they are beyond the superficial gloss.
Here’s yesterday’s edition:
https://cornerstone.ghost.io/essentials-august-7-2024/
Please help me make this work. Send me links to articles/videos etc. that you believe fulfill the mission I’ve set out.
And let me know how all this strikes you.
Discover more from Dan Gillmor
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Well, good luck!
Just for my edification, can I ask about how the goals are intended to be achieved here? That is, I’ve often thought there’s a big problem in that at less than the highest levels, the people who read someone generally already agree with them overall (n.b. apply reasonableness, not 100.0000%, but pretty close). Thus in practice, an “Orange Man Bad” newsletter is read by people who think the orange man is bad, therefore it doesn’t change anything in the world. On a personal level, one can try for the various “influencer” rewards. But per the “power law”, those are very rare and hard to achieve – only a very few at the top benefit, everyone else basically wastes time and effort (this was blog-evangelism, and now somewhat coming around again with paid newsletters).
There’s a lot of people doing punditry of roughly “The Mainstream Media Should Be More Democratic Party Partisan”. No offense meant, but it’s a really crowded field. Maybe I’m viewing things too pessimistically given my discouraged low level. Yet it just seems to me like the classic situation where anyone besides the harshest, most strident, or best-networked practitioners, is going to be losing out in terms of audience to the aforementioned examples (maybe you’re in the “networked” special case).
P.S.: The newsletter url isn’t a link – was that a mistake?
I do what I can, and if it goes nowhere that’s on me.