I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”
Are you new here? Get free emails to your inbox daily. Would you rather listen? You can find our podcast here.Today's read: 5 minutes.
Today's read: 5 minutes.
Dear Tangle community,
When I sent my first Tangle newsletter out to 13 friends and family members, I gave them this fundamental pledge: to build a news organization that everyone can trust, regardless of their political affiliation. Five years later, that is still our north star. We are a big-tent news organization for conservatives, liberals, and everyone in between — something exceedingly rare (and perhaps nonexistent) in today's media ecosystem.
I'm proud to say we are fulfilling that mission today. Part of how we build trust is to lean into transparency, which you might see in how we track and explain corrections prominently in our daily newsletter.
But at the end of the year, I like to demonstrate that transparency in a different way: I write a note like this to our entire mailing list, giving you all an update on our business, telling you a bit about what happened in the last year, and describing what I hope will be coming in the next year.
First, some housekeeping. Today is Christmas Eve, which means the Tangle team is about to step into our annual holiday and New Year break. If you are new here — as many of you are — here's what you need to know: I believe in working hard, playing hard, and pacing ourselves. I know the media business is a difficult one, so I work myself to the bone and push my team to bring their best every day, too. But I also know that many people in the news business burn out and fail, in part because of how demanding it can be. To avoid that, we take regular breaks to position ourselves to win in the long run.
To that end, we'll be off from now through Friday, January 3rd.
Over break, we’ll share an edition with our favorite content from the year, as well as a special New Year’s edition of The Sunday newsletter for paid subscribers. Barring any major breaking news, it's likely that you won't get a normal newsletter from us until Monday, January 6, 2025. After a long, exciting and grueling election season, I'm looking forward to the team coming back refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to go.
Before we log off, though, I want to share with you that end-of-year update. I'm also going to ask all of you to take our end-of-year survey. This survey is a way for us to take your feedback constructively to improve Tangle, and also a way to check in on who exactly is reading Tangle today. So, even if you don't feel like reading this end-of-year update, please do me a huge favor to help improve Tangle by taking three or four minutes to complete this survey. To show my appreciation, and to motivate submissions and feedback, anyone that takes it will be added into a drawing for a $250 gift certificate (so long as you leave your email). We’ll announce the winner on January 6.
Looking back on 2024.
This was one of the most remarkable years of my life.
I've been writing Tangle for five-and-a-half years now. Candidly, much of that writing has been done in relative obscurity with this incredible, niche, and slowly but steadily growing community. This year felt like the one where we finally broke through.
In April, we hosted our second-ever live event, this time in New York City. The event sold out, and we put on an awesome show with some heavy-hitting guests. Immediately after that wrapped, I got on a plane and flew to Vancouver to give a TED Talk about our work and the importance of language, an actual bucket-list moment that drew new eyes and ears to what we're up to here at Tangle. Then, in August, Tangle’s Executive Producer Jon Lall and I flew to Chicago to cover the Democratic National Convention in person — the first time Tangle had been credentialed for such a major event.
In October, we were featured on Brian Reed's new podcast Question Everything, and This American Life re-ran the episode in November. That episode drew millions of new eyes to Tangle. That same week, we held an in-person election party in Philadelphia and hosted an election-night live stream with tens of thousands of people tuned in for our coverage. In the middle of election night, I appeared on Amazon's first-ever night of live news coverage, which was hosted by Brian Williams. And then, at the end of November, we won a Shorty Award for News & Media — one of the most prestigious awards in digital media — in both the audience and Shorty panelist categories.
Amidst all this, I sat for dozens of interviews about our work, and we continued to grow. A lot. When the year started, we had roughly 88,000 people on this mailing list; today we are just shy of 300,000. When the year started, I was hopeful that this was going to be the year we'd break $1 million in membership revenue. Today, we've exceeded $2.5 million. When the year started, I had just hired Ari, Jon, and Will. Since then, we brought on Russell, Sophia, Aidan, Shourya, and Nathan. We're planning more hires in early 2025, which I'm excited to announce, and we continue to build out our small but mighty team.
We launched our premium and ad-free podcasts, including the Sunday podcast, where Ari and I chop it up about all the news from the week (and bring on various guests and team members to talk shop). The podcast is now being downloaded hundreds of thousands of times a month, with a whole new audience outside of the newsletter.
We finally got our fiscal sponsorship off the ground, so major supporters of Tangle can make tax-deductible donations to support our work (specifically, our YouTube channel, which we plan to invest in throughout 2025 as we attempt to connect with a younger audience). This is an exciting new way for us to diversify our revenue even as we grow a sustainable media business built primarily on membership support. And, by the way, if you are interested in being a donor, we have someone dedicated to that on the team — you can email Christopher at christopher@readtangle.com.
On Sunday, we launched a complete redesign of our website, which is now much prettier, much sleeker, and more fun to spend time on. Our Instagram channel broke 40,000 followers, which is a great platform for us to reach a younger audience that often lacks a balanced media diet (and you can follow that channel to receive news updates during the break). Our profile on X continues to grow, as does our YouTube channel, and we have now joined Bluesky, Truth Social, and TikTok, too. We want to meet our audience where they are — and also find new readers and listeners in the wild. We know these platforms are often the best ways to do that.
What's coming.
After the year we just had, there are a lot of exciting things on the horizon for us.
As always, we'll never stop focusing on our two core products: the newsletter and the podcast. We are going to keep tinkering and improving each — and making sure our audience is getting what they came here for.
Along the way, though, we are hoping to offer more. We'll be soliciting opinion pieces and essays from big-name writers. We'll be doing more original reporting. We'll continue publishing reader essays. We'll continue landing interviews with prominent people in politics. And we'll keep publishing our free daily newsletter and podcast where we explore one big, divisive issue in American politics.
As for your experience as subscribers, we just hired Nathan, our first-ever head of customer service, who is already helping subscribers manage their subscriptions and resolve technical issues in a much more timely manner. Going forward, we are going to keep building out the team in 2025 with an eye toward improving our product for you all. That means continuing to make editorial hires who help us improve our content (the newsletter and podcast, specifically) and maintain ideological diversity in our newsroom (the Tangle way).
Early next year, we are hoping to complete a membership bundle of our newsletter and podcast, so people can buy and manage memberships to unlock premium, ad-free content right on our newly redesigned website, which will be a lot easier than what they are doing now. We are already cooking up a couple more in-person events, so stay tuned for more on that front. While we're going to stay laser-focused on building our newsletter and podcast audiences, we are also hoping to do more reporting on our YouTube channel, like we did during the election.
We're thrilled about what's to come, but we're also open minded. We want to know what you think — how we can improve, what you want more of, and what you want less of. So, please, if you could take a few minutes to complete our end-of-year survey, it would be incredibly helpful for us as we try to improve Tangle for our audience.
Thank you.
Finally, I just want to say thank you. Every year around this time, I feel incredibly grateful to be leading a media organization like this — one with a mission I'm proud of; with sustainable growth; with an open-minded, skeptical, curious, and dedicated community. I will never take this for granted, and I know we are only here because of your support — so thank you.
As we head into this break, I encourage you to step back as well. The news can be frustrating, stressful, and depressing. This time of year is a great time to take a brief hiatus, spend some time with family or friends, and generally try to get outside and give yourself a break. When we come back in 2025, we’ll be sure to update you on everything you missed.
Happy holidays,
Isaac & and the Tangle team
