NOTE TO SUBSCRIBERS

NOTE TO SUBSCRIBERS

Our community of subscribers remains as fundamental as ever to the independent journalism we produce. I thus wanted to update you on several new developments in our work:

In January of this year, as most of you know, we moved our platform for both written and video journalism from Substack to the combination of Rumble and Locals. In multiple notes to our Substack subscribers, including the last posting we made to Substack on January 16, we explained that everything would essentially continue as it was before, just in a new location.

Specifically, all subscribers to our Substack page would receive free membership to our Locals community upon joining. Roughly 75% of our Substack subscribers have migrated to their free Locals subscription. While that is good news, it still means that one out of every four of our subscribers has not used their free and automatic membership to our Locals community.

If you have not yet done so, you can simply click on this link – here – and that will take you to Locals. Then simply sign up for Locals, for free, under the same email you used to become a Substack subscriber (ask for a new password to be sent to your email), and you will automatically receive full subscriber status in our Locals community for however much time remains on your Substack subscription. If you are having trouble with this step, please send an email to victor@systemupdate.tv and we will help you through this.

Since we left Substack in January for Rumble and Locals, the primary focus of my work has been the 90-minute live nightly show we produce, called SYSTEM UPDATE, that airs every Monday through Friday at 7pm ET. All of those episodes, along with selected separate segments, can be seen here on our Rumble page, freely available to the public. Each episode can also be heard in podcast form, and are posted to Spotify, Apple, Google and all other major podcasting platforms twelve hours after they are first broadcast live on Rumble (you can follow us on podcast platforms under "SYSTEM UPDATE WITH GLENN GREENWALD").

We are excited about the success this show has proven to be in such a short time.

Each night, our show is watched by many hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes more than a million, in the first twelve hours after it airs. It is listened to by many more on the podcasting platforms, meaning our goal of reaching a new and larger audience with this program has been fulfilled. And our audience size continues to grow with each month.

Recently, we covered the GOP presidential debate live from Milwaukee; interviewed in person one of the leading candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy, on the morning immediately following that debate; and used our trip to speak with Rumble's founder, Chris Pavlovski, about the serious censorship challenges which all platforms face. In the last week, we covered the controversy over the Anti-Defamation League (ADL); spoke to leading establishment critic (former establishment insider) Jeffrey Sachs about Ukraine and China; interviewed Julian Assange's father live in our studio about recent positive developments in the efforts to free his son; and dissected the latest fraudulent, pro-censorship "disinformation" studies promoted by the Washington Post, the EU and an Omidyar-funded group of self-proclaimed "disinformation experts." On the ten-year anniversary of the start of the Snowden/NSA reporting, we spoke with our source, Edward Snowden, and my journalistic colleague, director Laura Poitras, about the ten-year retrospective.

There is no such thing as good journalism that does not make an impact, and that in turn requires reaching as many people as possible. For better or worse, in today's digital culture, huge numbers of people do not read articles but instead only watch videos or listen to shows. Failure to make one's reporting available to them is to limit the impact and reach of one's work. That – along with our belief in the importance of Rumble's free speech mission – is why we undertook the often labor-intensive responsibility to produce a live nightly show on that platform.

We realize that many people, including many of our Substack subscribers, prefer to consume news and analysis in written rather than video or podcast form. For that reason, we have hired several people whose job it is to produce daily written transcripts of the entirety of each program we do. They work to ensure that the transcripts are professionalized, easy to read and immediately available.

Those daily transcripts are available solely to our Locals subscribers. That means, in essence, that our subscribers receive a substance-heavy and timely article about the news every day. Our team works hard to ensure that each SYSTEM UPDATE episode is similar to the articles I have always written: serious, heavily researched, and built around enlightening reporting and analysis of the stories that most matter yet are receiving scant media attention, featuring perspectives not widely available.

Our daily transcripts reflect this work. And we hope that anyone who enjoyed my once-or-twice-a-week reporting and writing at Substack takes advantage of those on Locals.

Beyond those daily transcripts, we also produce a twice-weekly after-show, on Tuesday and Thursday nights, solely for our Locals subscribers. Immediately following the conclusion of the live SYSTEM UPDATE show on Rumble, we move to Locals for that subscriber-only conversation.

That after-show is live and interactive: we take your question, respond to your feedback and critiques, and discuss your suggestions for stories to cover and guests to invite on. That opportunity to speak twice a week with our core audience has always, to me, been a vital means for journalistic accountability, and some of our most-watched programs have come from audience suggestions.

The one aspect of my work that I had intended to do more of with this move, yet have not yet been able to do, is regular, original written-form journalism of the kind I did at Substack. That has been due in small part to the very labor-intensive nature of producing a live, nightly show and in small part due to other writing obligations, including my work as a biweekly columnist for Brazil's largest newspaper, Folha de Sao Paulo.

But the primary reason for this omission are the significant limitations imposed by personal issues relating to the nine-month hospitalization of my husband, David Miranda, and then his death on May 9. After my hiatus from the show due to that, we produced a segment about David's life, death and legacy. It would be less than honest if I did not acknowledge that these difficult events have, among many things, significantly limited the amount of work I have always been able to produce in the past.

I am looking very forward to returning to producing regular written journalism along with the nightly live show and these other commitments. That was always part of the plan when moving to Rumble and Locals. I expect that I will be able to return quite soon to that, and when I do, Locals will be where my work will be published, in exactly the same way and format it was on Substack.

I am genuinely grateful to our community of subscribers, who enabled me to continue doing the independent journalism I wanted to do – and to have more impact than ever with my work – once I resigned from The Intercept in October, 2020.

I know that our move from Substack to platforms that were not universally known – Rumble and Locals – has not always been a model of ease and clarity, though we did our best to be as communicative as possible about the rationale and the process, and to ensure that our Substack subscribers had full access to all of my work there for no additional cost. One of the features we intend to implement, starting next week, is a weekly newsletter to our community of subscribers, with news about the work and reporting we did the prior week.

There is an inherent resistance to moving to new platforms, and we understood from the start that we would have to overcome that hurdle. When I first moved to Substack, most people did not know what it was. We know that both Rumble and Locals are growing in recognition and use – certainly the audience sizes are larger – and hope that any of you who have had any type of resistance to expanding your platforms to include both of them will be more willing to do so soon.

For those of you who have moved with us, we are particularly grateful. And for those who have not yet received your free Locals subscription, we hope you will shortly. We are proud of the work we have been producing there, and are confident that the best is yet to come.

Glenn Greenwald