• The Challenge: In the crazy early days of the Trump administration, Matt Kiser launched a daily blog and newsletter: What The Fuck Just Happened Today? It got a ton of attention.

• The Strategy: WTFJHT has expanded its product offerings, but it’s built around membership and the community that supports the work.

• The Numbers: About 1 percent of the site’s readership supports the project, and it costs about $10,000 a month to produce.

• The Lessons: Kiser has created a membership model that allows people to contribute their skills and expertise in addition to money.

Now, let’s dig in a little deeper:

The Challenge

Matt Kiser created What The Fuck Just Happened Today? in the frenetic early days of the Trump administration.

It feels like a million years ago now, but in January 2017 the headlines were dominated by discussions over the size of the crowd at President Trump’s inauguration, “alternative facts,” the Women’s March, the Travel Ban, and more.

It was a lot to keep up with. “I can’t even process the current status of this shit. it’s moving too fast,” Kiser tweeted at the time.

Kiser, then a product manager at a Seattle-based startup, decided to start the newsletter and blog to chronicle what was happening each day in national politics over the course of Trump’s first 100 days in office.

People began to notice WTFJHT. Interest in the project exploded.

Within the first few weeks he had more than 48,000 newsletter subscribers with an open rate greater than 50 percent. The site received more than 2.5 million monthly pageviews.

Everyone from BuzzFeed to the Irish Times wrote about WTFJHT.

What started as a side project for Kiser had unexpectedly grown into a more substantial undertaking.

Kiser quit his job and began working on WTFJHT fulltime. The project has continued past the 100-day mark. (Today is day 413 of the Trump presidency.)

Now he had to make a living from it. And he had to figure out how to grow it.

The Strategy

At her home on Martha’s Vineyard, freelance editor Susanna J. Sturgis, who I mentioned in the intro, receives the alert on her computer.

“The notification for each issue pops up, and I almost immediately drop what I’m doing, I call up the website and go over to GitHub,” she said. “I’ll read through as carefully as I can.”

Sturgis is among the most prolific of the handful of volunteers who help Kiser edit WTFJHT. They’ll typically fix small things — think changing it’s to its — but the editors will also fact-check Kiser’s work and offer editorial guidance.

“It’s a nice work break for me and it just works,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like an imposition. It feels like I’m putting my skills to use.”

• 5 p.m. EST: Amditis begins producing the WTFJHT podcast.

The podcast is an adaptation of the Daily Update newsletter that Kiser sends out every weekday. Amditis voices the podcast and reads through the top stories of the day. He will also add in audio clips or re-word things to make them sound better for audio.

WTFJHT launched the podcast in September 2017, and Amditis first pitched Kiser on the idea earlier that summer. He was a fan of the daily newsletter and thought a podcast would be a nice complement to the blog and newsletter.

So Amditis created a sample, posted it to SoundCloud, and DMed Kiser on Twitter.

Kiser got busy though and never got back to him. A couple months went by.

But Amditis persisted. He was passionate about the project.

He told Kiser: “I really want to make this for you. I think your subscribers, readers, and members could benefit from this. I can’t always read the newsletter when I’m driving or walking home. Sometimes I just want to hit play and have someone read it to me, and I don’t want to hear Siri or Google Assistant’s voice reading it back to me.”

The podcast has been produced every weekday since the fall. Amditis tries to get the podcast published by 7 p.m. at the latest each night — though sometimes life or other responsibilities get in the way.

“People know that it’s just the two of us doing this,” Amditis said. “It’s not some massive organization, but we want to provide a professional and streamlined product.”

• 6 p.m. EST: Kiser sends out the Daily Update newsletter.

He copies the most recent version of the daily post on the WTFJHT site into Mailchimp and then hits send.

Since the start, the newsletter has been part of the core offering of WTFJHT, and blurbs summarizing the news have been at its heart since the beginning. Kiser also makes sure to appropriately credit and link back to the original reporting he’s summarizing.

Still, the update has evolved over the past year or so.

The summaries have gotten longer, he’s added new sections to the newsletter, he began directing readers to other WTFJHT products, and Kiser also started emphasizing membership. Each issue ends with “WTFJHT is supported by the readers.”

•8pm EST: Kiser will update the site with an evening update if there’s late breaking news.

And then the whole process starts over the next morning when Amditis adds the next day’s morning update.

The Numbers

The Lessons

• Membership can be more than money: While direct donations are critical to WTFJHT’s sustainability, Kiser quickly came to the realization that there are other ways to support his work beyond direct monetary contributions.

He’s put out calls for people to share what skills or knowledge they can, and the WTFJHT GitHub is full of requests for help on projects Kiser would like to pursue.

“I think that’s a really big missed opportunity for news organizations,” Kiser said. “Your community is filled with experts. You can leverage this expertise of people who want to share and invest in what you’re doing.”

We’ve already discussed how community members help edit the site and how Amditis’ interest in WTFJHT led to the creation of a podcast, but Kiser has also leaned on readers to help with everything from developing an Alexa skill, to implementing new features on the site, and moderating the forums on the site.

With regards to the podcast, Kiser ultimately decided to work with Amditis to produce the podcast, for instance, because he felt that it stayed true to the brand on the website and in the newsletter and fit within his overall goals for WTFJHT.

“It’s turned into this great partnership. There’s so much more we can do there, and I think there are so many more examples to come of that [type of] relationship with members of the community who care deeply about the mission. They go from asking what do I get from this brand to how can I help this brand.

Some of the moderators have set up running threads to keep track of things such as who has left the administration. “It’s just cool to see a community create its own content,” he said.

Kiser has worked with a developer in London, who is volunteering his time, to create Current Status, a tool that’s launching soon that ranks the top stories of the day based on what stories the political media is following. (Think of it almost as a cross between Nuzzel and Nieman Lab’s Fuego.)

These arrangements work out for everyone. Kiser gets help he wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise, and volunteers feel like they’re able to contribute something meaningful to a cause they support.

Kiser acknowledges much of the volunteer help he gets on a page on the site and also regularly tells the contributors how much he appreciates their work.

That doesn’t go unnoticed, Sturgis, the editor, said.

“I really had the feeling that he respects me for my expertise and time and is giving me some credit for that,” she said. “I do a lot of editing for nothing for people who have no idea what goes into it, so actually being appreciated is a big plus.”

• “The Minor Threat of political newsletters”: As WTFJHT has grown, Kiser has worked to ensure that he doesn’t deviate from the core principles that led to its initial popularity.

“I’m not so worried about alienating or pissing people off so much as trying to do the thing that they came here for first and then offer them additional valuable things second,” he said.

He makes smaller tweaks to the core coverage with that in mind as well. Readers began to tell Kiser that the main narrative in the daily update was getting congested with too many stories. So he pared it back and created a Notables section at the end of each issue with stories that are worth mentioning but aren’t as important.

He’s taking that same approach as new opportunities present themselves, and he judges things based on whether they will detract from the central offering of recapping the news in a concise and clear way.

“I’m trying to become the Minor Threat of political newsletters,” he said, referring to the 1980s punk band. Some of the bands’ members created their own record label to be able to sell their music without major distributors.

“They put out hardcore records for all these great bands,” Kiser said. “They’ve remained true to their value system and they’ve never compromised on that value system. It gives them so much authenticity and cred within their community that people 30 years later still refer to them as I’m doing as one of the best hardcore bands ever.”

• You can only do so much: Even as Kiser tries to get community members involved, he’s trying not to overstretch himself.

There are two or three people, for instance, who primarily handle the copy editing.

“That’s a manageable number for me, Kiser said.  “Now, if I had 10 or 12 people doing that, now that starts to become a bit of a distraction. I don’t broadcast that as much even though on every blog post there’s a link that says ‘improve this article’ and people find it organically.”

He wants people to find ways to get involved on their own terms so they can make it want they want.

You also need to know when to say no or stop doing something. It’s valuable to experiment, but you shouldn’t keep doing things if they aren’t working.

Before partnering with Amditis, some other people tried working with Kiser to start a WTFJHT podcast. Kiser didn’t like it, so they stopped. It didn’t fit the brand. At one point Kiser was also selling merchandise, but fulfilling orders was taking up too much time so he’s put that on hold.

And just recently, Kiser experimented for a few days by asking community members to contribute their own blurbs for WTFJHT on a public Etherpad, a collaborative document from Mozilla.

Every day, up to 12 people would be posting links and their own summaries into the document.

“The problem was that it became unmanageable for me,” Kiser said. “It took me more time to leverage that wisdom of that part of the community and figure out how to make it fit into what I normally do.”

The Future

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