Two Years of How Things Work
Our annual update on surviving, independently.
The site you are reading, How Things Work, published its first piece on May 1, 2023. It’s now two years old. As I did last year, I am going to give you an update on how things are going here, two years in. (There will be more important things to talk about on May Day, so I’m publishing this a couple of days early). If you’re interested, read on.
Before I launched this site, I spent about 20 years working as a journalist—at alt-weeklies, at a trade magazine, at Gawker, at In These Times magazine, and elsewhere. I loved (most of) those jobs in various ways, but none of them gave me the same kind of connection with my readers that I have here. I get an email each time one of you becomes a subscriber. Even if there are hundreds in a day, I am telling you—not buttering you up here, I promise—that I feel a sort of warm feeling about the fact that you have chosen, voluntarily, to be a reader. It’s nice and when I tell you that I appreciate you all being here, it is true. A writer with no readers is nothing but a damn shame. How Things Work belongs to all of us collectively.
As I have mentioned before, the “business model” of this site is a little unusual. Rather than having a full or partial paywall and charging people to read, I have kept everything here free to read. And then I have come to all of you and said: “Hey, if you want this place to exist, and you are not broke, please throw in a few bucks.” It is a quasi-socialist model of media funding. The idea behind this is 1) It is unhealthy, in a civic sense, when access to quality information becomes a luxury good unavailable to lower income people; 2) As a writer I want as many people as possible to read my stuff; and 3) The world would be a better place if more things could be funded in this manner, so I just like to imagine that it will work. In an effort to keep things accessible, I have kept the monthly subscription price at “about a cup of coffee” and the annual subscription price at “about a dinner for two at a mediocre restaurant (no drinks).” There is also an option to become a Founding Member at a higher price point, if you are feeling especially generous.
So far, thanks to all of you, it has worked. Give yourselves a hand. You are proving the cutthroat capitalists wrong, one paid subscriber at a time. My first goal was to reach a level of income that would allow me to call this a real job. That has happened. My next goal was to reach a level of income that will allow me to do more reporting out in the world. That one has begun to happen as well—in recent months I’ve gone twice to DC and once to Texas to write pieces for the site. I hope to do more of this in the future, as resources allow. My final goal is to reach a level of income that would allow me to commission freelance work, and potentially one day to hire more staff. That is still a work in progress. But it is certainly not a pipe dream. I know more good journalists than I can count who have been laid off in recent years. The ability to re-employ some portion of those people and to give young writers opportunities at worker-owned publications is about the best case scenario that I can think of for the medium term future of American media.
I try not to get too heavy-handed on sales pitches here. They are annoying. Ultimately, this site will flourish if enough of you believe that it is worth paying something for, and if you don’t, it won’t. When I started this, the people at Substack told me to expect about ten percent of my total subscribers to become paid subscribers, using a paywall. Currently, less than seven percent of How Things Work readers are paid. That tells me that I am leaving a certain amount of money on the table by not having a paywall. Still, I have decided to continue to keep the site free for the foreseeable future. There is a lot of important work to be done in America right now, and “helping to build an honest and independent media” is one of them.
I am willing to accept a somewhat lower income, if all of you will tolerate me making one short ask here: Just like you, I read a lot of things without paying for them, because they are free, and I can. Most of the time I hardly think about it. It’s normal! Many of you have been reading this site for months or years now, for free. I’m happy you’re here. If you like How Things Work, and you are not destitute, I would appreciate it if you would take a moment now, on our second anniversary, to become a paid subscriber. By doing so you will help this place continue to exist, continue to grow, and to do more and better things in 2025. You will also help to demonstrate that this model of media funding is sustainable. You can subscribe right here:
People have asked me for other ways to support the site as well. There are a few additional ways: You can make a direct donation to our reporting fund, via Donorbox. You can buy my book about the labor movement, “The Hammer,” at an independent bookstore, or wherever books are sold. You can buy an incredibly fly How Things Work t-shirt, union-printed in the USA, at this link, which you can also find under the “Merch” tab at the top of the site. And, you can spread the word by giving a gift subscription to your friends—a great way to indoctrinate your fellow Americans into our revolutionary future:
The Year in Review
Here are the five most popular How Things Work posts of the past year:
They Are a Minority. Get your mind right.
It’s Not Looking Great. The slow assassination of the free press.
The Business Community Is Extraordinarily Stupid. Is dictatorship good for business?
Tesla Is More Vulnerable Than You Think. How to cost Elon Musk $100 billion.
They Are Going to Take Everything If We Don’t Stop Them. The government is going to destroy unions if we don’t fight now.
The tagline of this site is “Labor, Politics, and Power.” For the past decade or so, the main thrust of my writing has been to try to put forward the idea that labor issues are central to America’s political situation, rather than being some niche off to the side. Yet I know from experience that this is an uphill battle—labor pieces generally get lower readership than pieces about more general topics. This is a structural disincentive to write about labor, given the way that online media is typically monetized. But I will continue writing about labor because I am monetized by you, the readers. In honor of that, here are the five most popular labor-centric pieces of the past year:
Strike, Or Else. As Trump tosses out the TSA union contract, everything is on the line.
Dark Times Are Coming. The labor movement faces its worst environment in a century.
An Interview With a Boxer Who Is Paying the Price. Heather Hardy, and “too much dead brain.”
Confirmed: Unions Squandered the Biden Years. Welcome to single-digit union density.
One thing that happens when a publication is constantly gaining new readers over time is that newer pieces inevitably get more readers than older pieces, so the “most popular” lists are naturally skewed towards more recent things. But you can go back and read anything from the past two years of the How Things Work archive, for free, right here.
Looking Ahead
I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you, the attractive and wise readers of How Things Work, to use the comment section on this post to give me any feedback you like about where the site has been over the past year, and what you would like to see in the future. Reporting requests? New merch ideas? Events? General thoughts? I will read whatever you’d like to say. If I am being completely honest, I have to admit that I am a little fucking shocked that this place has survived and thrived for two full years. As a longtime journalist, I generally expect all good things to collapse spectacularly, or be crushed by powerful forces bent on retribution. That may well still happen. But for now, we are here, we are making it, and we are doing it together. Pretty fucking cool.
Thank you all for your support of How Things Work. Meet back here in a year, in a free America, to see how it’s going.
- Hamilton
I read a lot of Substacks and subscribe to only a few. (Budgets as they are.) I chose to subscribe to yours precisely because you keep it free and open to everyone. It also stems from a conscious effort to resist my own desire to be among those who are gate-kept. Good and true writing, like every art, is a public good. I also have found that your articulation of the importance of labor to "what is happening in America" has helped add an additional lens to my understanding of our situation.
It might be interesting to host / interview labor leaders or union members from other countries where labor is a much more powerful actor. (I currently live in France and despite all the grumbling and inconvenience associated with les grèves, the contrast with the US is stark and I'm very grateful to live in a place where labor has power and can be collectively mobilized.). Understanding in a very tangible way what a labor movement with a actual political power can do and how it acts might help stir the American imagination.
Thank you for your writing! I value it.
As a member of a teacher’s union, I think reporting about the internal diversity of large unions would be valuable. How national unions vs state unions vs individual bargaining units work, have different priorities, and sometimes have opposing interests