Isaac here. We’re off from our normal newsletter today for Columbus Day, but I’m thrilled to welcome you to the first-ever edition of Press Pass, our once-a-month newsletter that pulls back the curtain on what is going on behind the scenes at Tangle, gives you a chance to shape our future, and provides an insider’s look at the team delivering your political news each week.
In an era where media trust is at an all-time low and so many audiences are thirsting for more transparency, we thought this would be a great benefit for our paying subscribers. Not only will it help you better understand our business and the inner workings of our operation, but you’ll also get to know members of the team and give us early feedback on product ideas. Transparency and trust have always been at the heart of Tangle’s mission, and I think this newsletter will be a valuable way to deliver on those promises.
We’re going to start sending Press Pass out on the second Tuesday of every month, and we’re excited to invite you all in.
What we've been up to.
A core part of this newsletter will be sharing details about the inner workings of Tangle — the big discussions we’re having as a team, the challenges we’re grappling with, and the things that are on our minds that you don’t hear about in the newsletter.
This month, the Tangle team gathered in northern Vermont for our third ever team retreat. Over the last year, we went from five to 12 full-time team members — a pretty incredible rate of growth. This was the first time all 12 of us were together, in person, since that hiring spree around the election. Only three members of our team work out of our Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, office; the others are in Vermont, New York, Tennessee, Colorado, Oregon, California, Texas, Virginia, and the United Kingdom — so it was a pretty special thing to all be in the same room for almost an entire week.
The Tangle team around the campfire.
I like to structure our retreats with a good mix of work and fun. In this case, we had about a dozen one-to-two hour “sessions” where we tackled existing problems with Tangle or kicked around ideas about the future. We’ve already made a few small changes to Tangle that we discussed in person, including the launch of the “Staff Dissent” blurb at the end of some “My take” sections, which has been really well received.
Moving forward, we’re thinking about a few big problems to tackle. We want more ways to show off the ideological diversity and differing opinions of our team. We’re also trying to solve for what we sometimes call the “Isaac bottleneck” — i.e., not making so many parts of the business so reliant on me, personally. We’re also noticing that a lot of people are starting to take a break from the news. A few years ago, the #1 reason people unsubscribed from Tangle was because they felt we were too biased (with a pretty even split of accusations we were left or right).
Increasingly, the #1 reason people unsubscribe is news fatigue. Concurrently, we’re also seeing open rates fall by a few percentage points, and I’ve heard from newsletter operators across the politics space that their subscribers are checking out, too. So, broadly speaking, a lot of news consumers just seem to be consuming less news right now.
Our team discussed a lot of great ideas to address these problems, including a few I think we are going to pursue:
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