We Left Substack. But You Can Come With Us. Here's How.

Court Watch was accepted into beehiiv’s ‘Media Collective’. What it means for the next chapter of our news organization.

Editor’s Note: If you’re just stumbling upon this post from December 2024 and our site in general, feel free to subscribe here. Don’t use the subscribe button on Substack. Use this link. If you make a mistake, no worries, we’ll transfer over new Substack subscriptions to beehiiv once a week. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber and get access to past stories, you can do so on www.courtwatch.news/upgrade and then click on the story you want to read on www.courtwatch.news

By Seamus Hughes

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t care how sausage is made, only that it’s delicious, then you can stop reading after these next four lines: Court Watch was chosen to be a member of newsletter publishing platform beehiiv’s inaugural ‘Media Collective’ cohort. It’s a big deal for us for a variety of reasons outlined below. We’re also leaving Substack. This will not affect your ability to read our stories every week.

For folks who like the tea about what led us to join the Media Collective, here’s why nothing but also everything will change. First, we’ll explain the nothing and then we’ll get to the everything.

Nothing Changes For You.

If you’re a subscriber, free or paid, you will continue to get Court Watch’s reporting directly to your inbox. For the free subscribers, you’ll keep getting our reporting in real time, but as usual, stories will be paywalled after a week. If you’re a paid subscriber, first of all, we appreciate you. Second, your subscription will continue unabated and nothing will change on your end. You’ll keep getting breaking news and our weekly roundup straight to your inbox, but as usual you will have access to past stories in our archives. We’ll keep taking your money and promptly depositing it into our U.S. Courts’ PACER fee account. Having reviewed the dockets, we can confidently say that our process operates as the only court-approved and legally-encouraged money laundering operation in America.

We’ll continue to report the news when it breaks. We’ll still do our Friday morning weekly roundup. We’ll continue our partnerships with 404 Media, Forbes, Rolling Stone, and others to be publicly named later news organizations. We’ll still be an independent news organization with no corporate overlords. Nothing changes. Except…

Everything Changes For Us.

Being an academic at NCITE (University of Nebraska Omaha) who has spent the last two decades studying terrorism, while casually and consistently breaking national news, we’ve never been particularly conventional. We didn’t go to journalism school. We didn’t cut our teeth after college on a local paper. But we have a unique reporting skill that got us into the journalism door later in life: uncovering court documents and making them available to the public. We took that opportunity and tried to learn the craft through trial-and-error and by working with impressive reporters. And we’ve been fortunate that the discerning editors at great papers have supported our abilities. Occasionally, fancy and important people have decided we played a small part in reporting that is prize-worthy.

We also have an unnerving inability to be patient. So when beehiiv announced a new ‘Media Collective,’ we promptly applied. When we didn’t hear back in two days during a holiday week, we did what any normal reporter would. We tracked down contact information and cold emailed the CEO and the COO of beehiiv with our pitch. As our first editor once told us, patient journalists rarely make news. After taking a concerning long six hours to respond to an unknown email address asking for something, they replied and agreed to let us in. (Editor’s note: We once tried that cold email technique for a chief judge to explain the importance of the public’s right to records. As a result, search warrants in California are not sealed as a default anymore. It never hurts to send an email, unless you’re one of these guys.)

We’re excited about the possibilities of beehiiv. So what does being in their Media Collective mean for the Court Watch community?

Taken together, it gives Court Watch a chance to expand our reporting, protect our newsroom, and potentially reach a larger audience. It also opens up some of our nights and weekends to not have to figure out the back of the office work of running a news organization and instead use our free time looking at how to save kids from themselves and randomly deep diving the Guam court dockets. We’ll never have a socially acceptable hobby. That’s ok. Life is about passion, ours is extremism and court records.

So here’s how beehiiv makes life easier for us and a better reading experience for you.

We are working on a fancy new website that is more easily customized for our viewers. A relatively barebones version with all our past reporting will go live on Tuesday at our normal url www.courtwatch.news. The more interactive one will be rolled out slowly in the coming weeks, as our focus right now is on ensuring the subscriber transfer to beehiiv goes smoothly. But we’re hopeful that we’ll get to a place where Court Watch is not only in your inbox, but also a standalone site where you check daily for new stories that don’t automatically head to your email.

The move also helps get us on a path of viability. Don’t worry people hate-reading us, we’re nowhere near taking a salary from Court Watch. However, we are closer to at least not getting a bill from it. As we discussed last month, Court Watch was hemorrhaging money the last two years largely due to government-mandated PACER fees. When we asked for paid subscribers in November, a whole lot of you stepped up. We are getting closer to break-even status. We could see, if we squinted a bit and turned our head ever so slightly, a path to sustainability. But for every paid subscriber we added, Substack took a ten percent cut. For a company that’s also reportedly hemorrhaging money, that’s entirely their prerogative. But as our paid subscriber numbers increased, that meant hundreds of dollars a month scooped up by a venture capital backed startup that couldn’t be used to cover our PACER fees or hire freelancers.

A move to beehiiv allows us to commission an extra freelancer story each month. If given the choice of paying already rich people in San Francisco or paying a reporter in a news desert, we pick a reporter every damn time. Additionally, Stripe, our subscriber credit card processor, announced a rate increase that forces us to eat more fees on our end. If we kept on this trajectory, we’d be way off that proverbial sustainable path through no fault of yours or ours. A move to beehiiv doesn’t immediately solve our long-term viability issue but it does give us much more runway to make an honest go of it.

There are other perks that will come with the move. beehiiv is helping offset the costs of litigation insurance, which any independent reporter will tell you, a threat of a lawsuit haunts you in the night like a 529 page court transcript without a $3.00 fee maximum PACER fee. They’re also giving us access to lawyers to gut check some of our more sensitive reporting prior to publication to make sure it can stand up to legal scrutiny. We’ve covered enough SLAPP cases to know how important having legal protection is.

As a member of the collective, beehiiv is providing onboarding support to stand up our new site and thousands of dollars in “boost” credits. To put the importance of that in context, we once bought a Google ad for Court Watch. That resulted in just one email from a concerned mother requesting an update on her son’s criminal case. She asked if we thought her son’s lawyer was any good. A quick review of the lack of motions for discovery revealed he wasn’t. Changes were made and a defendant got proper counsel. She never became a subscriber (free or paid) and that fact may or may not haunt our dreams every night. It was the best but most ineffective advertising money we ever spent. We’re academics and journalists. We're not Madison Avenue wunderkinds and we barely know what SEO stands for. We desperately need a guide to the world of promoting our news site and growing our views. With a six month retention rate hovering at 85%, we know if people just find Court Watch, they like and stay with Court Watch. We're happy to have adults at beehiiv to help us find more loyal readers.

beehiiv is also throwing in covering the costs of using Getty images for stories. So we can finally stop hating every Subtack A.I. image creator that gives us things like a suspected militia member with four fingers but no hand. That in and of itself, is reason enough to head to beehiiv. (editor’s note: our first order of business will be trying to convince the team there that the ‘b’ should be capitalized in their name so we can still be invited to the secret Associated Press style guide holiday party.)

All of those above reasons are important. However, if truth be told, there was an overarching decision for the jump. We strongly believe journalism isn’t dying. It just needs to find its people. People that believe that you should have access to primary source documents so you can form your own opinion with the most information possible. People that support access by the public to its public records. People that want to read the news in a way that is accessible and occasionally enjoyable.

Simply put, in a time where nonpartisan fact-based journalism is increasingly a novelty rather than a default, beehiiv is saying in words and putting in resources to create a place for that type of journalism to flourish. That sounds like our type of people.

Why Leave Substack?

Let’s be honest, the vibes are off in Substack. From our humble vantage point, it’s increasingly not a place for journalists but instead a bug light for influencers. Or journalists trying to be influencers. Or influencers masquerading as journalists. We’ve been on Substack for two years. In that time, our reporting has been the basis of hundreds of national and local stories. A review of our subscriber base shows that our growth doesn’t typically come from the Substack network but instead from readers like you sharing our pieces with your friends and family. The Subtack algorithm seemed to prefer shiny things instead of straight news (or “subscribe to us and we’ll subscribe to you” posts). That’s fine, but that’s not us. We report on cryptocurrency scams, we don’t try to sell you them. It’s sometimes awkward to be on the same algorithmic feed as our potential future subjects of a pig butchering story.

Substack is pushing their app hard and subscribers to its website through its Notes function. It feels like they want to create a one-stop shop that is quickly becoming yet another echochamber on the Internet. If everyone portrays themselves to be edgy and contrarian on one site, then we hate to break it to you, no one on that site actually is. However, the edgy and contrarian is a very effective shtick for outrage induced paid subscribers. But again, that’s not us. We are old school ‘just the facts, ma’am’ reporters.

Substack also rolled out ‘followers’ and ‘subscribers’ which is a confusing separation that seems to be driven in an effort to increase engagement within Substack. We have 9,750 subscribers but another 5,000 followers for our publication on Substack who are not actual subscribers for Court Watch. The math ain’t mathin’ on that. And if we keep on that trajectory we will essentially be hitched to Substack for life. To be fair to Substack, one of its founders had a thoughtful back and forth with our editor on this point last week. Substack believes the large follower/subscriber difference and their push for the app is more an added bonus for sites and not a requirement or an albatross that prevents leaving. We’re not so sure about that but maybe we’ll be proven wrong. We hope, for our reporter colleagues staying with Substack, that our inclination is incorrect.

However, we’ve covered enough technology company related bankruptcy proceedings or changes in algorithms to know you don’t put your trust in one place. Also, we’re in an age of decentralization of how you get your news. A little bit from this site, another bit from that site. We worry about any approach that tries to be the one place for it all and doesn’t encourage you to leave the sweet warm embrace of an echochamber. Finally, our editor spends his work days looking at some of the worst that society can offer, all things being equal, we’d rather not continue to publish alongside some of them.

Conclusion

We painted a rosy picture for our future with the beehiiv. Part of that is because we are hopeful about it. The other part is despite doom scrolling the dockets, we’re forever the optimist. But here’s the thing, it’s also admittedly a leap of faith. For all its considerable faults, Substack is still the biggest newsletter game in town. We’re jumping off their tall tree branches and hoping these last two years have taught us enough to fly. We’re doing so because beehiiv represents a real and unique opportunity to expand our reporting.

We’re going to keep doing what we’ve always done. Report stories we find interesting and hope others find them as fascinating as we do. The last two years have taught us our hope is not misplaced.

Like we said at the start, nothing is changing but also everything is. We’re still us, just with some much appreciated support. We’ll still be the type of folks who use the third person when a piece like this is clearly better suited for first person. No new hosting platform will change that or all the other quirky but somehow endearing things that make Court Watch what it is.

So, thanks for reading and continuing to support us in our next chapter. If you have any questions or concerns, you can always drop us a line.

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