Tangle - Thank you. For everything. And see you in 2025.

Starting point is 00:00:00 From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and I'm here today with something a little different, our end of year note to the Tangle community. So when I first started Tangle, sending our newsletter out to 13 friends and family members, I gave them this fundamental pledge. I was going to build a news organization that everyone can trust, regardless of their political affiliation.

Starting point is 00:00:52 Five years later, that is still our North Star. We are a big tent news organization for conservatives, liberals, and everybody in between. Something exceedingly rare and perhaps even non-existent in today's media ecosystem. I'm proud to say we are fulfilling that mission today. Part of that mission is to demonstrate transparency, which you might see in something like how we track and explain corrections prominently in our daily podcasts. But at the end of the year, I like to demonstrate that transparency in a different way. I write a note like this to our entire mailing list and podcast listenership every year,

Starting point is 00:01:29 giving you all an update on our business, telling you a bit about what happened in the last year, and describing what I hope will be coming in the next year. So first, some housekeeping. Today is Christmas Eve, which means the Tangle Team is about to step into our annual holiday and New year break. If you are new here, as many of you are, here's what you need to know. I believe in working hard, playing hard, and pacing ourselves. I know the media business is a difficult one, so I work myself to the bone and push my team to bring their best every day, too. But I also know that many people in the news business burn out and fail, in part because of how demanding it can be. So we take regular breaks to position ourselves

Starting point is 00:02:09 and win in the long run. To that end, we're going to be taking off from now through Friday, January 3rd. Overbreak will share an edition with our favorite content from the year in the newsletter. We'll also have a special New Year's Eve Sunday edition newsletter that's going out to paid subscribers. But barring any major breaking news, fingers crossed we don't get any, it's likely that you won't get a normal podcast from us until Monday, January 6th, 2025. After a long and exciting and grueling election season, I am very much looking forward to the team coming back refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to go. And I'm looking forward to some rest myself. Before we log off though, I want to share with you that end-of-year update. I'm also going to

Starting point is 00:02:54 ask all of you to take our end-of-year survey, which is linked to in today's episode description. This survey is a way for us to take your feedback constructively to improve Tangle, and also a way to check in on who exactly is listening to Tangle today. So even if you don't feel like listening to that end of year update and you're reaching for your phone right now to go listen to another podcast, please just do me a huge favor and help us improve Tangle by just taking three or four minutes to complete that survey by clicking the link in the episode description. To show our appreciation and, of course, to motivate submissions and feedback, anyone that takes the survey will be added into a drawing for a $250 gift certificate

Starting point is 00:03:33 so long as you leave your email in the survey. We'll announce the winner to that drawing on January 6th. With that, I'd like to take a moment to look back at 2024. This was one of the most remarkable years of my life. I've been writing Tangle for five and a half years now. Candidly, much of that writing has been done in relative obscurity with this incredible niche and slowly but steadily growing community. This year felt like the one where we finally broke through. In April, we hosted our second ever live event,

Starting point is 00:04:05 this time in New York City. The event sold out and we put on an awesome show with some heavy hitting guests. Immediately after that wrapped, I got on a plane and flew to Vancouver to give a TED talk about our work and the importance of language, an actual bucket list moment that drew new eyes and ears to what we're up to here at Tangle. Then in August, Tangle's executive producer, John Law, and I flew to Chicago to cover the Democratic National Convention in person, the first time Tangle had been credentialed for such a major event. In October, we were featured on Brian Reed's new podcast, Question Everything, and then This American Life reran the episode in November. That episode drew millions of new eyes to tangle. That same

Starting point is 00:04:45 week we held an in-person election party in Philadelphia and hosted an election night live stream with tens of thousands of people tuned in for our coverage. In the middle of election night, I appeared on Amazon's first ever night of live news coverage, which was hosted by Brian Williams. And then at the end of November, we won a Shorty Award for News and Media, one of the most prestigious awards in digital media in both the audience and Shorty panelist categories. Amidst all of this, I sat for dozens of interviews about our work, and we continued to grow. A lot. When the year started, we had roughly 88,000 people on this mailing list.

Starting point is 00:05:19 Today, we are just shy of 300,000. When the year started, I was hopeful that this was going to be the year we'd break $1 million in membership revenue. Today, we've exceeded $2.5 million in membership revenue. When the year started, I had just hired Ari, John, and Will, and since then, we brought on Russell, Sophia, Aiden, Shoria, and Nathan. We're planning more hires in early 2025, which I'm excited to announce, and we continue to build

Starting point is 00:05:45 out our small but mighty team. We launched our premium and ad-free podcast, including the Sunday podcast, where Ari and I chop it up about all the news from the week and bring on various guests and team members to talk shop. The podcast is now being downloaded hundreds of thousands of times a month with a whole new audience outside of the newsletter. We also finally got our fiscal sponsorship up off the ground so major supporters of Tangle can make tax-deductible donations to support our work, specifically our YouTube channel, which we plan to invest in throughout 2025

Starting point is 00:06:15 as we attempt to connect with a younger audience. This is an exciting new way for us to diversify our revenue even as we grow a sustainable media business built primarily on membership support. And by the way, if you are interested in being a donor, we have someone dedicated to that on the team. You can email Christopher at chrisopher at readtangle.com. On Sunday, we launched a complete redesign of our website, which is now much prettier, much sleeker, and much more fun to spend time on. Our Instagram channel broke 40,000 followers, which is a great platform

Starting point is 00:06:45 for us to reach a younger audience that often lacks a balanced media diet. You can follow that channel to receive news updates during the break. Our profile on X continues to grow, as does our YouTube channel, and we have now joined Blue Sky, Truth Social, and TikTok too. We want to meet our audience where they are and also find new readers and listeners in the wild. We know these platforms are often the best ways to do that. So that's what happened. What about what's coming? After the year we just had, there are a lot of exciting things on the horizon for us. As always, we'll never stop focusing on our two core products, the newsletter and the podcast. We're going to keep tinkering and improving each and making sure our audience

Starting point is 00:07:23 is getting what they came here for. Along the way, though, we are hoping to keep tinkering and improving each and making sure our audience is getting what they came here for. Along the way, though, we are hoping to offer more. We'll be soliciting opinion pieces and essays from big-name writers. We'll be doing more original reporting. We'll continue publishing reader essays. We'll continue landing interviews with prominent people in politics. And we'll keep publishing our free daily newsletter and podcast where we explore one big divisive issue in American politics.

Starting point is 00:07:45 As for your experience as subscribers, we just hired Nathan, our first ever head of customer service, who is already helping subscribers manage their subscriptions and resolve technical issues in a much more timely manner. Going forward, we're going to keep building out the team in 2025 with an eye toward improving our product for you all. That means continuing to make editorial hires who help us improve our content, the newsletter and podcast specifically, and maintain ideological diversity in our newsroom, The Tangle Way.

Starting point is 00:08:12 Early next year, we are hoping to complete a membership bundle of our newsletter and podcast so people can buy and manage memberships to unlock premium ad-free content right on our newly redesigned website, which will be a lot easier than what you guys are doing right now between Supercast and Acast and Ghost and all the different platforms. So we're excited for that. We're already cooking up a couple more in-person events, so stay tuned for more info on that front.

Starting point is 00:08:34 And while we're going to stay laser focused on building our newsletter and podcast audiences, we are also hoping to do more reporting on our YouTube channel like we did during the election. We are thrilled about what's to come, but we're also open-minded. We want to know what you think, hoping to do more reporting on our YouTube channel like we did during the election. We are thrilled about what's to come, but we're also open-minded. We want to know what you think, how we can improve, what you want more of and what you want less of. So please, if you could take a few minutes

Starting point is 00:08:54 to complete our end of year survey, again, linked to in today's episode description and in today's newsletter, it would be incredibly helpful for us as we try to improve Tangle for our audience. And finally, I just want to say thank you. Every year around this time, I feel incredibly grateful to be leading a media organization like this, one with a mission I'm proud of, with sustainable growth, with an open-minded,

Starting point is 00:09:17 skeptical, curious, and dedicated community. I will never take this for granted, and I know we are only here because of your support. So thank you. Of course, if you're not yet a Tangle member, please consider becoming one. You can get ad free and members only podcasts by going to tanglemedia.supercast.com. Memberships are the only reason any of this is possible. As we head into this break, I encourage you to step back as well. The news can be frustrating, stressful and depressing. This time of year is a great time to take a brief hiatus, spend some time with family or friends, and generally try to get outside and give yourself a great. When you come back

Starting point is 00:09:52 in 2025, we'll be sure to update you on all the things you missed. Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and we'll see you guys on the other side. Have a good one. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will K. Back, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bacopa, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. If you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to reettangle.com and check out our website.

Tangle - Thank you. For everything. And see you in 2025.

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