You may be drawn to delete this email because you’re sick of getting newsletter subscriber pitches, but we promise this will be the only subscriber pitch you’ll get from us this summer. And let’s be clear at the front end, it’s our most important subscriber pitch in our four-year history.
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If you’ll indulge us for a moment, let’s recap the last month for Court Watch. Our reporting was cited in the New York Times, CBS News, NOTUS, CNN, Axios, Associated Press, Politico and Newsweek. We, and this seems like it can’t possibly be true for a two-man money-losing reporting shop but somehow is, discovered a previously dormant federal court’s first ever case.
Since July, we have produced more than a dozen original stories ranging from our weekly roundups, breaking news, and deep dive stories. During all of that, we also trained hundreds of reporters on how to find stories in the federal court records system. We completely revamped our website to make it more reader-friendly to find our reporting. Finally, we rolled out a Slack-like channel where we break news nearly every day.
We did all this on a budget that is a rounding error for most other news organization. A budget that, to be clear, simply covers our back-office reporting costs like PACER fees. We don’t pay ourselves a salary. We don’t have investors. There’s no runway of funding to keep the lights on. We didn’t start Court Watch to get rich, but it sure would be nice not to lose money every month doing this type of journalism. We love doing this. We need your support to keep it going.
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In order to make this news site viable for the next few months, we need a hundred new paid subscribers. We could tell you that doing so will get you access to our Sunday series - The Rabbit Hole. And that you could ping us on any court-related case questions. Or that you would be supporting independent journalism with documented impact. Those things are true. But also, increasing our paid subscribers gives us the room to chase the stories we currently cannot because the cost of purchasing court transcripts and running down leads is currently too expensive to do for our small news organization.
Court Watch has led the news this last month. That may not happen again without your help.
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