“...was first reported by Court Watch” - Associated Press
“...first reported by the online news site Court Watch.” - The Washington Post
“...It was first reported by Court Watch.” - CNN
“...was first reported by the independent news organization Court Watch” - CBS News
“...first to report on the government’s initial sealed filing” - The New York Times
“...Court Watch, an excellent site that tracks federal litigation” - The Los Angeles Times
“...first revealed by Court Watch” - Politico
Those quotes are just from the last three months. As Court Watch enters into its fifth year of existence, we’re nothing if not consistent in breaking news.
We’re not going to sugarcoat it, this is our annual subscriber drive email. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’re also getting this note so you can get a sense of how things are going, but you’ll be spared any future reminders this week. We sincerely appreciate your support. If you’re a free subscriber and an annual subscriber drive is not your jam, you may find yourself mildly annoyed by how persistent we will be in asking for support this week. It is what it is and the cost we all have to pay for our PACER bill.
In this piece, we’re going to be radically transparent in our reporting and finances, and wherever possible note what worked well this year and the places we fell short. The bottom line of it all: We’re in a better place than we were last year, but there are significant headwinds.
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Current Status.
We have 10,303 active subscribers now. Over the last 12 months we gained 3,150 readers and lost 3,068, a net increase of…(checks notes)…82 subscribers. While the attrition rate seems quite bad, it was purposeful. When we left Substack two years ago, we brought with us an email list of individuals who subscribed to our newsletter along with dozens of others, many using Substack’s app to quickly glance at our pieces. They were passive readers.
This year, we made the decision to lean in on engagement and a list of folks who were religious in their reading, so we set up systems to automatically unsubscribe anyone who hasn’t opened an email from us in the last 90 days. It is a painful choice for our subscriber list vanity, but the right one over the long run. We now consistently have an open rate of nearly 60%. Our lowest open email rate this year was 54%. The next lowest was 58%. Our Friday roundups have a ridiculously high click through rate of 9.8%. We’re reliably told those numbers for a weekly newsletter are quite good.
We’re happy to note we’ve increased our paid subscriber numbers. Last year, we had 514 paid subscribers. As of this morning, we have 738.
We used $14,000 of subscriber support to hire freelance reporters for some of the nearly one hundred stories we produced this year. We spent $12,181.60 in government-mandated PACER fees to provide court documents for free to our readers (nearly a thousand dollars more than this time last year). We shelled out a few thousand dollars in credit card processing fees for reader subscriptions. We paid several hundreds of dollars for a lawyer to file a motion to unseal for us (editor’s note: joys of certain court rules requiring local counsel). We paid smaller sums to maintain our website domain and email addresses. The remaining money helped cover our news site’s taxes.
This is all to say, we just about broke even this year. But we didn’t take a salary. As has been true for our entire news site existence, we free labored the hell out of making this work. That means early mornings, late nights, and every weekend. After four years of operations and countless news coverage successes, taking no salary is admittedly a hard pill to swallow.
The Ask.
Let’s lay it all out on the table early into this piece. We’re aiming for 250 new paid subscribers in this drive. That would get us in the realm of 1,000 paid supporters and a place where we can expand our reporting to new areas. We strongly believe, as we’ll explain later in this piece, we’ve made the case this year that our reporting is unique, worth supporting, and one of the last nonpartisan fact-based watchdogs for the U.S. Courts. (If you are already a paid subscriber or a free subscriber who just wants to make a one-time donation, that option is available to you.)
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The Output.
We published forty-eight weekly Friday roundups, with an average of 46 individual court document links in each issue. That means, that at minimum, we reviewed and reported on more than 2,000 federal court cases just for our roundups. That number is definitively the floor though, because a lot of cases we look at never rise to a level of publication.
Our least popular roundup was titled, #171: SantaCON?. A cynical observer may assume it’s because you all hate Christmas. But being Court Watch subscribers, we know the real reason. You hold animosity toward Santa because December 25th is a federal holiday and thus, the courts are closed that day. We share your Grinch-like views on court access. The most clicked court document of the year was about a judge mocking a defendant's font choices. The second most clicked was regarding the size of the private anatomy of a former NFL player. The third was an opinion about the horrible conditions within federal prisons. Thus proving our favorite truism about Court Watch subscribers, if given enough chances, you’ll eventually click on something of substance.
If you were curious, like we were, the most played to song of the week had the chaotic energy that best matches Court Watch. Followed closely in clicks by a quirky song about the apocalypse and the Autobahn. You all get us.
Our highest read piece was a story about a judge deciding that ‘Tower Dumps’ were unconstitutional. We like to think that it was our readers’ way of thanking us for spending time, money, and resources the year before unsealing the underlying docket that was the basis of the story. Very meta of you all.
We published forty issues of our Sunday series deep dive, The Rabbit Hole. Those are forty pieces that took time away from our weekends and most other areas of life, but they delivered a dying breed of journalism. We wrote about everything from the countless stories going unreported on the dockets, the ridiculous lengths that North Korean workers go to pose as Americans, the rise of AI-supported violence, coups gone awry, and Iranian covert activities in the United States.
We chronicled the growing loss of transparency in the courts through the death of legacy media. In February, Rachel Weiner published a piece with us about reporting on the Eastern District of Virginia shortly after the Washington Post laid her off as part of cuts that upended its newsroom. And in September, we reported on how national cuts to McClatchy newspapers will lead to less local accountability.
The Rabbit Hole also admittedly had an uncanny ability to recognize legal trends before they showed up in national headlines. We’ve been on the forefront of detailing how the FBI is trying to combat nihilistic violent extremism. Months before the Seventh Circuit issued a controversial opinion about AI-generated images, the Rabbit Hole did a deep dive into the case. In April, we examined the history and case law of courts revoking people’s citizenships, three months before the Justice Department filed an all-time high number of cases. That’s all a reflection of watching the courts every day and spotting emerging trends before they become more widely known by other news organizations. Our Rabbit Hole reporting has also appeared in appellate briefs and opinions.
Our favorite piece this year was one that was unlike any of the others. For weeks, we painstakingly reported, reworked, and edited each and every line. We talked to theologians and national security experts, and we consulted with at least one diocesan priest. The result was a story we titled The Church Bells Still Ring. It was also one of the least read pieces this year. We would sincerely appreciate it if you'd give it another read, and wherever possible, share it with your online and offline networks. We’re proud of both the reporting and the unique writing style and yet saddened it didn’t get the reach we believed the topic of the piece demanded.
Most of our Rabbit Hole pieces are only available to paying subscribers. It’s a reflection of the time and effort required to provide them every week and a thank you to our readers for giving us the financial support to do deep reporting.
We also had other standalone pieces and efforts. We were the first to report on the reactivation of a dormant 30-year-old federal court. We successfully sued in federal court twice to unseal documents of national importance, and defeated the Justice Department’s attempt to stop that unsealing three times. As has been true at least once before in our short history, our reporting on obscure criminal cases magically resulted in the federal government dropping the charges.
We visited, in person, nine federal courts this year. Many of those times to get access to records only available at a court house. In at least one of those trips, we left with two suitcases filled with documents. We’ll have more to say about that next month.
This year, we completely revamped our website to make it more reader friendly and easier to find stories. We’re very thankful to the good folks at beehiiv who assisted in that transformation. We’re also thankful that beehiiv made the decision to extend our membership in its Media Collective initiative again this year. We’ve routinely leaned on the program’s perks, including having lawyers provide reviews of sensitive stories to ensure we’re on a strong legal standing before publishing. We ran the numbers this weekend, between the fees and the noise, we are fully convinced we would have shut down Court Watch if we were still hosted on Substack. The move to beehiiv was a leap of faith and required a lot of time and effort to create a new standalone site, but it was most certainly the right call.
Our reporter Peter Beck was awarded his first journalism grant for a project examining the closing of Justice Department civil rights investigations into local law enforcement and prisons during the current administration. As the news organization committed to publishing the reporting that comes from that grant, we have some big ideas on pushing the reader experience on that series to make it both accessible and engaging.
Where we fell short.
We issued two corrections on roundups this year. In both instances, it was an oversight by our editor who read the court documents too quickly and lost the nuance of what the filing attorney was saying in the legal writing. That’s twice too many. We’ll endeavor to be more exacting in our fifth year and will always make corrections immediately and transparently when our reporting gets it wrong.
We unequivocally failed to implement any ads or sponsorship that other comparable-sized newsletters and impactful news sites have. As a reader, you’ll likely be happy with falling short on that aspect. But as a news site with razor thin margins, being able to have a second stream of revenue would be a welcome safety net. Our lack of ads was largely a reflection on wanting to spend whatever time we could find on reporting and none on cold-calling businesses. That’s one of those things that sounds justifiable but when the difference between having ads or closing down due to lack of funding, it has the potential to be a deadly mistake. Every other news site has a team of people that run their ad department. We most certainly do not. We think there is a good story to tell why a business should run ads on our site, chief among them that we have an engaged readership and subscriber representation from every major facet of American influence (media, law, policy, and the like.). If your company would like to consider an ad on Court Watch, reply to this email or apply to buy an ad spot here. If you have experience in selling ads, let us know, we’re in the market for bringing on some paid expertise.
We tried over the summer to start a Slack-like channel for Court Watch readers to push out breaking news and build a community of interested readers. We like the promise of having a more informal and close relationship with our readers. We also pushed some news exclusives and scoops that way. Nearly two hundred readers joined our community. But we’re going to level with you, we’re not sure we can keep it going. We’re a two-man team with full-time jobs. The effort needed to build something like a true Court Watch community is immense. With your permission, we may keep it going for a little longer, but barring having the funds to bring on another reporter who can assist, we’re not sure our separate online community is long for this world.
We have yet to pivot to video. But we know it’s where everyone else in our journalism world is going so it would be foolish not to consider it. We’re told by people who would know that it's also the place to go to build a larger subscriber base. We cut our teeth with the written word, we really don’t want to ‘just pop on for a sec’ to give Generation Z the latest update from the Eastern District of Virginia but will if it’s what’s required to keep Court Watch in existence. We are seriously considering starting a TikTok and Instagram channel. We hate the idea. We’re probably going to do it anyway. Please don’t judge us if you stumble upon a future video of us dancing to Meghan Trainor outside of E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse. Just know that we debased ourselves only to save independent investigative journalism and not because the world desperately needs to experience the unadulterated pure joy of witnessing the awkwardness that comes with a print reporter attempting to look cool and trendy on video.
Headwinds.
We’ve noticed an uptick in paid subscriber attrition in recent months, likely as a result of a tough economic climate (and, of course, in no way a reflection of people losing interest in our reporting). Search results are not driving traffic like they used to. Our web traffic has fallen nearly 35% from last year to this one. A.I. answers will only serve to reduce that number even further. Even when we break the story, A.I. answers favor links to large news organizations that have rewritten our original scoop.
We’ve tried to better understand the media landscape to prevent some of these growth losses. Over the summer, we joined a cohort of independent news sites that took part in a large technology-company’s months-long journalism publishing training course to try to learn ways to stave off that fate. Let’s just say, respectfully, we didn’t leave hopeful. It’s clear that there is no white knight riding to save small news sites. It’s just you and us. That’s ok though because we’d rather be reliant on grassroots support and word-of-mouth growth than faceless multibillion dollar companies who knowingly created systems that kill original reporting and now feign surprise when their products do exactly as they were intended to do.
The U.S. Courts announce a ‘temporary’ (editor’s note: five years is temporary…?) increase in PACER fees from 10 cents to 12 cents starting in January. If the increase was in place this year, that would have resulted in an additional $2,436 in fees for our reporting. We would have run a deficit. Unless we bring on more paid subscribers, we will most certainly lose money running Court Watch in 2027. That would lead to some serious soul-searching about our future. It’s bad enough to work early morning, late nights, and weekends and still not be able to take a salary, it’s even harder to know we’d be losing money doing it.
The internet is becoming more balkanized, with individual internet silos that very rarely cross. Discoverability is a huge issue for us, we largely get new subscribers from word-of-mouth, the shoutouts of our reporting by larger media organizations rarely results in new subscribers. If you’re not in a place to financially support Court Watch, we need your help getting the word out. Please recruit a friend, family member, or a dog with glasses to subscribe to Court Watch. As a general rule, every 100 free subscribers we add, that ultimately results in at least 7 of them eventually choosing to upgrade their subscription. This is to say, if you can’t support us financially, you still have a massive ability and opportunity to keep Court Watch running by telling your friends about our news organization.
We’ll have more to say this week about other aspects of building Court Watch but if you got this far down this piece, you’re a Court Watch evangelist or one of our biggest haters. Either way, we appreciate you. This last year has made it clear that we’re a serious, but still engaging, news organization with real and lasting impact. Help us reach our goal of 250 paid subscribers or consider a one-time donation to keep our independent, fact-based, nonpartisan, investigative journalism running strong.
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P.S. Long-time Court Watch readers may have noticed this piece’s Easter Egg. This year’s lede mirrors the one from our subscriber drives from two years ago. If the history of our news scoops is any guide, we’ll be able to use a similar lede next year, but only if we reach our subscriber goals this year.
