Help Reason Thrive While Legacy Media Die!
Also: New $100,000 challenge grant just dropped!
It is Day 2 of Reason's 17th annual (no, really!) Webathon, that magical time of year when we ask you, cherished readers/viewers/listeners/commenters, to consider making a tax-deductible donation to the 501(c)3 nonprofit that makes all our journalism and commentary and Remy videos possible.
The right honorable Katherine Mangu-Ward yesterday spelled out the various swag levels and reasons to DONATE TO REASON RIGHT THE HELL NOW, so I want to focus on the remarkable postelection moment we all find ourselves in as both consumers and producers of media. BUT FIRST!
Beloved Reason Foundation Chairman Gerry Ohrstrom has just offered a $100,000 matching grant! That means: The next X Webathon dollars, all the way up to $100,000, will be doubled by our generous chair. That would put us around two-thirds of the way there to this year's goal of $400,000!
PLEASE MAKE GERRY'S WALLET BURN!
Back to the subject at hand. To put it only a little bit overbluntly, 2024 was the year when the legacy media industry, like Mr. Bojangles' dog, finally up and died. And Reason—with your continued generous support!—is an integral and proudly libertarian component of what comes next.
You've all seen the headlines: "Trump Wins, the Press Loses," "Trump's Victory Shows the Flagging Influence of Mainstream Media," "Trump's Win Cemented It: New Media Is Leaving the Old Guard Behind," and so on. Newspaper subscriptions plummeting, Twitter-loathing journalists licking their wounds on Bluesky, cable news ratings plunging by nearly 50 percent.
In the face of long-term, largely self-inflicted industrial collapse—a topic I explore at some length in the January issue of Reason—journalists have mostly accelerated their own oblivious marginalization. Consider this lead paragraph from CNN's Reliable Sources newsletter on Monday: "Donald Trump voters 'were not operating on a plane of shared facts.' That's what Julia Preston, a former New York Times and Marshall Project reporter turned Kamala Harris canvasser, quickly came to believe while knocking on Pennsylvania voters' doors this fall."
Reason's journalists, while happily opinionated, will not soon become canvassers knocking on doors for any political candidates. Nor will we blame voters for not sharing our interpretations of facts. For 56 rollicking years, while legacy media have gotten more shrill and less factual, we have cheerfully made libertarian arguments to a less-than-libertarian world, trusting that evidentiary rigor and some well-timed humor can persuade while reliably informing. And thanks to your support, we have pivoted our flagship nimbly into whatever technological waters audiences are congregating in, rather than whining impotently about the vanished, once-captive markets of the past.
Look where all of the media juice is flowing postelection: Indie newsletters! (Reason's got a dozen of 'em.) Freewheeling podcasts! (Check.) Viral videos for the TikTok kidz! (Say hello to our little friends.) While legacy publishers scramble to rebalance their hopelessly tilted newsrooms, and the navel-gazers contemplate (at least for a week or two) exiting their ideological and geographical bubbles, Reason continues the outsider legacy of our visionary and iconoclastic 20-year-old college dropout founder, flowing easily between mainstream media spaces and their alternative competitors.
Reason is in a phenomenal position to seize this political and media moment. There are people with the incoming president's ear who have some radically libertarian ideas for taming the administrative state; we will be covering their uphill exertions. People who we've interviewed about their speech being suppressed by the Biden administration have now been nominated to join the Trump administration; we will be encouraging them and anyone else to open all relevant state files. (Speaking of which, you really should sign up for Free Media, Robby Soave's weekly newsletter and video series on "free speech, social media, and why everyone in the media is wrong everywhere all the time.")
At the same time, our consistent application of principle means we will be a go-to source for credible, real-time critiques of the incoming administration's worst ideas, from tariffs to reversing birthright citizenship to punishing broadcast companies. Neither hysteric nor apologist be; always fixed on the North Star of abolishing everything.
You are the reason we can keep sane while the political world around us goes mad. You are why we continue to grow while the media landscape fades away. Your donations are how we discover new technological worlds while keeping the old faith in Free Minds and Free Markets.
WON'T YOU HELP US MEET OUR $100,000 MATCHING GRANT RIGHT THE HELL TODAY?
