A few months ago, Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg founded a news site.
There are tons of those. This is different and worthy of your time.
My own opinion is that they are doing what they said they wanted to do and that they deserve to succeed.We’re trying to do something different.We believe there’s an under-served market for substantive, fact-driven reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture—informed by conservative principles. We’re offering journalism that sets aside clickbait, hot-takes, and outrage chum in favor of articles and discussions meant to enlighten and challenge. We aim for light rather than heat, we seek to provide information over mere affirmation and, with the exception of the first clause of this sentence, we prize quality writing over clichés...We had great hopes more than a year ago, when we first started to imagine a new media company. We knew we wanted to provide an alternative to the outrage-driven opinion slinging that has become so prevalent in journalism today...We wanted to build a more direct relationship with our readers and listeners by delivering much of our work directly to you—“pushed content,” in publishing jargon—and to create a community that might provide an alternative to the sewage that often passes through modern social media. We believed strongly that there was an audience for the kind of fact-driven reporting and commentary that we’d put at the center of our plans...What has happened in the year since has been remarkable. Thousands of you signed up early to support our efforts, becoming members before real membership benefits began. Tens of thousands of readers signed up for our newsletters—old-school liberals, hard-core conservatives, curious independents, and the politically homeless among them. We’re mailing our free newsletters to nearly 60,000 recipients—a number that grows by the hundreds each day. We’ve had newsletters that have been shared by several hundred thousand readers. We’ve launched two new podcasts, each gaining listeners by the thousands with each new episode. In just its third episode, The Dispatch flagship podcast climbed into Top 100 rankings among Apple news podcasts—alongside The New Yorker Radio Hour and the Meet the Press podcast hosted by Chuck Todd...There are certainly skeptics of what we’re doing. Again and again, we have been told there's “no market” for what we're doing, that a center-right media company that puts facts and reporting at the center of the enterprise is doomed to fail. Writers catering to the alt-right dismiss The Dispatch and our “insignificant number of subscribers,” insisting that nobody wants the kind of news and analysis we’re providing.Some on the left say the same thing. The “popular prospects for The Dispatch ... seem dubious,” a writer at The New Republic wrote last week. What sells, we’re told, is outrage-stoking, opinion-slinging and “purely partisan diatribes that reinscribe the American right’s sense of utmost cultural exclusion even at a moment of peak political power.” The Dispatch “is trying to replicate a model of conservative discourse that’s failed again and again on the American right over the past 70-odd years.”
I would also argue that this country needs them to succeed.
Check them out here: The Dispatch