How you can strengthen The French Dispatch
Your favourite publication is continuing to move from strength to strength. However, The French Dispatch still needs your help and support to continue growing
Over the past few months, I’ve been involved in many discussions with you all and received a lot of feedback, requests, and comments from you lovely readers of mine about
, what you love about it, and what you want from it.Firstly, it’s great to know that we have such a strong base of readers who are willing to communicate with me, share my work, and want to contribute to helping build this project of informing our fellow citizens with fact-based reporting.
Secondly, these discussions have crystallised certain ideas for developing this publication, building it up in the short-term to set up stronger foundations for the future, and where we could potentially go
As this is a long article, here are some waypoints:
👨👨👦👦What do you (we) want?
🤝How you can help make The French Dispatch better
👨👨👦👦What do you (we) want?
So, to get straight down to it, what have you told me you want to see from
?Very generally, you want more French Dispatch: more content, more contributors, and more topics being covered
You want videos to watch, podcasts to listen to when travelling or working out, and debates to engage in and follow
You want more coverage of European and international topics to complement the coverage of French politics, drawing on my geopolitical expertise
You want more coverage of wider French politics and society, everything from the individual regions and their goings on to the relationship between the departments and the central government
You also want some more coverage of cultural topics, such as music, movies, and books to add a more fun edge to this publication
You want Twitch streams where we can have direct conversations about political events, debates, and more community building
And as if this wasn’t enough, one brave soul even said he’d be interested in seeing the development of a
knowledge base/wiki to draw from, which could be used to refer back to to understand who is who and doing what
The humbling message I’ve very clearly received from you all is that you love the work I’ve been doing and that I’ve succeeded thus far in my goal of helping you all in your quest for knowledge and information.
I love this, I love the passion, and I love your ideas! I want to grow
, and we’re very clearly all on the same page about thisHowever
One big limitation at the moment is that I’m only one person; this is not my full-time job and is one (very important) project that I work on regularly thanks to a lot of passion, but with only 24 hours available to me in a day
The hours I spend crafting the dispatches you enjoy and which help you to explore the world of French, European and global politics are limited, and while I do have a little more capacity to add to the experience, I still need your support!
This is why I have some requests for you, my treasured readers.
🤝How you can help make The French Dispatch bette
I’ve thought for the past few weeks/months about how you can help me to continue delivering this high-quality publication and meet your expectations, and these are the most logical things to do:
Refer TFD to your friends, colleagues, and communities
Volunteer some of your time to support The French Dispatch
Support The French Dispatch directly with a paid subscription or donations
Refer TFD to your friends, colleagues, neighbours, etc.
So, one of the best way for you as readers to help TFD is by making it grow, and the best way of doing this is to spread this within your networks.
The support that you guys show this publication is what helps to drive it forward
You'll get credit for any new subscribers that make it here when you use the referral link below or the “Share” button on any post. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.
If you already subscribe, you could also consider recommending
to make help get the word out and support our publication!Volunteer some of your time to support The French Dispatch
With the amount of work required to keep this going, I’m looking for some extra help to manage the processes and some of the extra work with developing
Currently, the positions I’m looking for are:
Volunteer Deputy Editor - France & Europe
Volunteer Social Media Manager
Content enhancers
Unfortunately, as much as I hate this fact, I can’t officially hire anybody for these positions. Still, for those who help, I would be more than happy to offer a free paid subscription and potentially a spot on the team in future if everything works out.
However, if you’re interested and want to apply/have a conversation, you can look at our open positions page here or just respond to this email.
Support The French Dispatch directly
Finally, and potentially the most “simple” way, directly supporting the publication with a paid subscription or donations goes a long way to supporting the publication.
With more funding, we can very simply do more to provide content, augment the content, and even add more varieties to the content you guys enjoy
Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:
And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:
I think that your whole idea and initiative has lot of potential in a similar way as the TLDR channel on Youtube. My challenge regarding assistance and help is that I am into Mon-Fri 9-17 schedule that is limiting my time for political and intellectual engagement