Please Join Us In Celebrating The First Anniversary Of “The Chaos Report”!
We wouldn’t be here without you, our audience, so we want to extend our heartfelt thanks.
We also want to let you know that we are making some big changes to the report starting today.
What’s changing?
Instead of providing a daily digest of the 5-7 biggest news events of the day, we will home in on 1, (maybe 2). And on some days, if we do not feel there’s anything really urgent to tell you about, we may not do a report at all.
So most of the time, you will still receive the daily newsletter in your mailbox every morning, just as you do now. But it’ll be different. And don’t be alarmed if on some days you don’t hear from us…
Sometimes what we deliver will be related to the biggest stories of the day, other times it might be smaller things that we find interesting.
These changes will allow us to do more original reporting, more in-depth analysis of the stories that truly matter, and more opinion (when we feel it’s appropriate and as always we’ll try not to be annoying about it).
Why?
Two Reasons:
1) As you may have noticed, we’ve been headed in that direction already for some time: our stories have become longer and more comprehensive.
When we launched “The Chaos Report” on April Fool’s Day one year ago, we intended it to be a “news avoidance” product, because we were hearing from so many of our friends at the time that they were so fed up with what was going on in America every day that they really didn’t want to hear about it: it only made them mad.
So what we set out to do was deliver a daily digest of only the biggest news events, linked to the best stories we could find, that would be delivered in time for most people’s morning commutes, and would never take more than 5 minutes to read.
Since then, the feedback we’ve gotten from our audience has indicated an almost complete 180. People are at a higher level of engagement than ever. We now believe you want more detail, more information, more ideas for action, not less.
So instead of continuing with our current format we are shifting to try to address what we believe to be a profound change in your needs, based on what we think you’re telling us you want.
2) When we set out to do this, we anticipated it would take no more than 90 minutes a day of our time. And for a while, it did. But as our audience grew, and we began distributing to more platforms, it became more than a full-time job.
We didn’t do “The Chaos Report” to make money. We did it because we felt we had to. It’s our small way of trying to contribute to the dialogue and debate in what is a inarguably a critical time in our nation’s history.
At the same time, we can’t continue to do more than a full-time job without any income to speak of.
In a sense, we are a victim of our own moderate success: the number of people seeing our stories every day continues to grow significantly, interaction with our audience (which we love) is more and more constant, yet we are still far from a point where we’d be self-sustaining.
We are proud of the fact that despite operating on a shoestring budget with a part-time staff of 3, we have not missed publishing a single day the entire year. Unfortunately, given economic and other realities that does now have to change. For that, you have our apologies.
With that said, we are excited about the changes, and hope they will serve you well too. We feel we can continue to provide you with a worthwhile experience that will better address your current desires, and frankly, will be better for our health.
We are also going to be adding a podcast soon—so stay tuned for details on that!
We really hope you’ll stick with us, because we’ve really enjoyed having you along for the ride so far. If you feel our new format won’t work for you because you are still looking for exposure to a wider range of stories, we’d suggest you consider migrating over to Medium, where we syndicate all our stuff under our “Editor-In-Chief’s” account, (be sure to “clap” for us a lot), and there’s a lot of other material available from other people and sources as well. (The only downside is after a certain number of stories, they will charge you $5 a month, whereas our newsletter will remain free). Here’s where you can start if you’d like to do that: https://medium.com/@ericjscholl.
Thanks again, and please don’t hesitate to contact us with your feedback, ever. contact@thechaosreport.com. It’s how we thrive and grow!