Programming updates and your input requested

A suggestion box that we'll actually check

As we mentioned in our year-end recap, we’re hoping to accelerate the posts and programming this year. We’ve got three updates for you on that front:

1. Come hang out with us! Join us next week on February 11th, from 5:30-7:30pm at Jefferson Tap. Conor will be interviewing Alders Bill Conway, Nicole Lee and Samantha Nugent about last year’s budget, the process that got us there, and the outlook for 2026 and beyond. Tickets are free (we just need your help to hit a minimum), but we still ask that you register here to give us a heads up on numbers.

2. We’re turning on payments in Substack. A surprising number of you have signed up pledging that you’d like to contribute financially towards this little endeavor. We appreciate that! To date, those pledges have just been theoretical, but we’re planning to change that by enable payments sometime soon. That will allow us to pay a select set of contributing writers who go deep on particularly important and under-covered topics. That won’t be all (or even most) guest contributions, but we do want to be able to pay folks who invest substantial time into work that legitimately breaks news.

   Explicitly, please note that this is not a paywall. If you’re getting our emails now, you’ll keep getting them regardless of whether you’ve pledged to be a paid subscriber. We’re just giving you the option to support this project if you’d like to. We also won’t actually turn on payments until next week, so consider this a heads up (or an invitation, if you were already considering pledging).

3. Please take our reader survey. We’re trying to figure out where this all goes next, and would very much appreciate your input. The short survey below will help us do that. All questions are optional, but we’d very much appreciate your thoughts - and candid feedback about what’s working, what could work better, and what else we should do.

And as always, thank you for reading. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any other questions, comments, or ideas.

-Conor and Richard