Two years ago The Recount moved out of beta with our first daily product. A short summary of national news, The Daily Recount was designed to cut through the bullshit endemic to mainstream media. As we grew, The Recount cultivated an incisive voice that never wastes time, rejects tired tropes, and focuses on the core values of journalism: Identifying the truth, holding powerful interests to account, and reflecting the world as it is today, not the way it used to be.
Twelve months later, that voice had found a huge audience on Twitter – which in 2020 was pretty much the white-hot center of the political narrative we were covering. In my post summarizing that first year, I laid out what we’d learned, and how the audience who had gathered around our work was responding. And I indulged in a bit of boasting: “Since launch one year ago,” I crowed, “our work has been viewed more than half a billion times.”
We’ve shot well past the billion mark since then, with more than 3 billion audience impressions along the way. The past year has been full of milestones, lessons learned, and big plans for the future. Here are a few of them:
- First and foremost: THANK YOU TEAM RECOUNT! We made it through the worst of a pandemic that shut down production, sparked confusion and contraction in media markets, and forced our entire team into their homes for the past 20 months. I can’t say enough about how extraordinary the folks at The Recount are – and how happy we were to re-open our new offices earlier this month.
- Even as Delta raged, we raised our Series B this past summer. This gave us the capital we needed to grow our edit staff, our coverage areas, and our distribution.
- Since then, we’ve doubled the size of our team, including nearly 50 full time editors and producers focused on our unique brand of visual journalism. And we brought on Ryan Kadro as our Chief Content Officer. Among many other things, Ryan will oversee our editorial strategy and lead the expansion of our streaming product.
- The Recount Wire, an expression of our editorial voice which I described last year as the “human algorithm” underpinning all of our work, has expanded its coverage of “moments that matter” to the people and narratives driving business, technology, and culture.
- We produced countless stellar features on everything from CEO pay to Basic Income, Bitcoin to the US Senate.
- Our signature style of “bringing the receipts” journalism tore up social platforms for yet another year, whether it was Dr. Fauci, Ron DeSantis, Trump, Zuckerberg, or the local police.
- You can view all our work on our newly redesigned site, which got a refresh for the first time since its launch two years ago.
- We added two extraordinary people to our Board of Directors: Maya Wiley, a respected legal expert and social justice advocate who recently ran for Mayor of New York, and Elisabeth Sami, a savvy veteran of the television and news industries’ shift to streaming who recently left NBC.
- We completely redesigned our daily newsletter, which has grown significantly and become my morning ritual for understanding the stories that matter across our four pillars of coverage. Sign up here!
- We launched our podcast unit straight into the teeth of the pandemic last year, and since then, have logged 7 million downloads. If you’re not listening to John Heilemann’s signature pod Hell & High Water, for example, you’re really missing out – it’s a gem.
- We kicked off new partnerships with amazing companies like P&G, Comcast, Yahoo!, Acast, Roku, YouTube and more.
It’s been a hell of a year – one that John Heilemann and I will recount in our annual “Recounting 2021” conversation this December – but the next 12 months promise to be even more eventful. We’ll be debuting a new streaming service, launching new programming (like The Long Game featuring LZ Granderson and Will Leitch, coming next month), and adding even more talented journalists to our ranks. We’ll expand our presence on selected social platforms like Snap and TikTok. And we’ve got a few curveballs working as well – more on those as they land. And throughout the coming year, we’ll continue to keep close and knowing tabs on the worlds of politics, business, tech, and culture in order to help viewers beat back information overload – and keep the bullshit at bay.