Impeachment newsletter new offering from parody tweeter
One Friday morning last September, as the Democrats prepared to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, Dan Sinker had a thought.
As he rode the train to see a friend — “in that interstitial train time when you’re not doing anything,” as he puts it — he got to wondering: Why hadn’t the Democrats set up a website to explain what was going on? Something that consolidated the news, the reasoning, the next steps?
Sinker’s thoughts often travel quickly from his brain to Twitter, and so he tweeted what he now calls his “offhanded comment.”
Enthusiastic replies rolled in so fast that by the end of the train ride he had another thought. He tweeted that too:
“I’m just gonna have to do this aren’t I.”
And that’s how Sinker’s popular newsletter, impeachment.fyi, was born, despite the facts that A) he didn’t know how to do an online newsletter and B) when he polled his Twitter followers on that same September day, 57% of respondents said, “no not another newsletter.”
Sinker is an independent journalist and writer who may be best known as the author behind @MayorEmanuel, the parody Twitter account that The Atlantic magazine called “the best fake Twitter account ever, deftly satirizing Rahm Emanuel, and elevating the tweet and the F-word to the level of literature.”
What he’s aiming for with the newsletter, however, isn’t satire. His opinion is generally clear — he calls himself a progressive — but he keeps the snark and commentary in check.
“Part of the problem we have right now,” he said Friday, “is outrage cycles burn everyone out. Clickbait opinion pieces burn everybody out. I don’t want to contribute to that. This isn’t about making people outraged. This isn’t about girding people for a fight. This is a utility: Here’s what happened.”
Down in the basement of the Evanston home where he lives with his wife and two kids, Sinker, who’s 45, quickly figured out newsletter technology. In the relatively calmer days of late 2019, he spent a couple of hours most afternoons sifting through news he collected during the day — from newspapers, TV, Twitter — then reducing it to a list of bullet-point items he could mail out by 6 p.m.
It was a novel notion at the start. But as impeachment heated up, mainstream news organizations started their own newsletters, podcasts and blogs aimed at shrinking the onslaught into something more userfriendly.
Fine by him.
“It would be very, very silly for me,” he said, “a person who is writing a newsletter that is hooked into everyone else’s reporting, to say, ‘Hey, I’m doing this and you can’t.’”
Despite the competition, Sinker’s newsletter has attracted 12,000 subscribers, by his count. No one has to pay, but many leave an online tip. He’s been making enough money to make it worth the work.
Sinker’s followers seem to like his newsletter precisely because he’s not part of an institution, though he’s always careful to link to the institutions that provide his information. In that way, the story of his newsletter is as much about news dissemination as it is about the news itself.
“Reading his newsletter feels like a very well-informed and sincere friend is trying to help regular people make sense of an exceedingly complex and consequential event,” says Jennifer Brandel, who founded WBEZ’s popular “Curious City” radio show and now runs her own company, Hearken. She calls his newsletter “empowering.”
Farran Nehme, a film writer, subscribed after hearing about it on Twitter.
“The newsletter consolidates the insanity and also makes it concise,” she says. “I still read in-depth reports and investigations, but I can’t do it every day … and frankly it wouldn’t be good for my mental health. I don’t know Dan and I often hope he’s holding up OK himself.”
He is. But in the past week, as the trial days have gone deep into the night, it gets harder.
“This is my first-ever foray into daily news,” he said. “Turns out daily news is hard. And it means I’m not around for dinner because I’m in the basement writing. That sucks because I like my family, and it sucks because I’m the one who usually cooks dinner.”
But he enjoys the challenge of boiling hours of testimony down into the most relevant points, and he feels obligated to get the newsletter out as quickly as possible when the day’s events are over.
At 9:39 p.m. Thursday, he tweeted: “OK, the trial is over for the night and tonight’s http://impeachment.fyi update should be up and with subscribers in about 20-30 minutes, hopefully.”
At 10:38, he wrote: “hahaha clearly it’s taking longer than that, as I’ve rewritten one bullet point like four times. Soon though!”
At 11:19: “OK, phew, tonight’s http://impeachment.fyi update is *finally* done and is reaching subscribers now. Sorry for the delay my brain just like seriously noped out there for a bit.”
The impeachment news has left a lot of us feeling seriously noped out on occasion, which is why Sinker’s experiment appeals to so many. We’re all living through this great moment that will soon be called history trying to understand without feeling overwhelmed.
“There’s a utility to news which is about saving people from news, right?” he said.
So he intends to keep going.
“At this point,” he said, “this whole story is ride or die till it’s done.”