Apparently, one piece of advice that has been helpful is, “Don’t hide your good stuff behind the paywall. Hayes said it’s been largely “an ad hoc process” of figuring what should and shouldn’t go behind the paywall. At launch, it offered a lifetime membership ($1,500), then added an annual membership ($100) when it launched its full site in January, and finally introduced a paywall and a monthly membership ($10) less than a month ago. “What Substack was doing fit pretty much exactly with what we wanted to build - a company with an editorial-first philosophy.”Īs part of that strategy, The Dispatch has gradually been rolling out its membership program and paywall. “We’re not trying to monetize eyeballs,” he said. In order to do that, Hayes said that building a subscription business with newsletter-focused digital media platform Substack (the Substack team also handles all of The Dispatch’s technical and product needs) was key. But rather than just recycling the same stories about, say, Bernie Sanders or the COVID-19 pandemic, The Dispatch aims to “take a breath” and try to approach important news in a fresh way. The startup says it’s now approaching 10,000 paying subscribers, adding up to more than $1 million in annualized revenue.Įditor and CEO Stephen Hayes (former editor in chief of the now-defunct Weekly Standard) told me that his vision for The Dispatch was to “slow down the news cycle.” That doesn’t mean ignoring the day’s headlines. (D.Is there an audience for a center-right news publication focused on original reporting and analysis? That’s the proposition that The Dispatch set out to test when it launched last October, and the early results are promising. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact-check record. Overall, we rate The Dispatch Right-Center biased based on story selection and editorial positions that moderately favor the right. A review of their fact checks demonstrates that they check both Democrats and Republicans, such as this: Has Donald Trump ‘Always Known’ Coronavirus ‘Is a Pandemic’? and Did Joe Biden Really Say ‘We Can Only Re-Elect Donald Trump’? (The Dispatch is a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network, which MBFC uses to fact-check sources) In general, The Dispatch reports news factually with a moderate conservative bias in story selection and editorial content. We do not review podcasts however, we reviewed The Dispatch’s fact checks and found them credible and accurate. The president, who in recent weeks has frequently downplayed the severity of the coronavirus, addressed the nation about the crisis Wednesday night.” A quote from the article reads, “It appears finally to have been enough for Donald Trump. This story, like most, is well written and adequately sourced to credible media outlets such as the LA Times, New York Times, and National Review.Įditorially, story selection often favors the more centrist right with stories moderately negative toward Democrats, such as this Why Is the Democratic Party Even Having Another Debate?, while at the same time not consistently reporting favorably on former President Trump, such as this: Trump Has a Chance to Unite Americans on Coronavirus. Articles and headlines often use moderately loaded emotional language: Bernie Sanders and the Rise of Woke Marxism. In review, The Dispatch provides a daily newsletter to subscribers, several podcasts, and a website that displays free news and opinion content, including fact checks.
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