After nearly 14 years, today is my last day as an employee of Daily Kos. It has been my great honor to build the activism department and email programs from the ground up, all in service of this wonderful community. I am deeply grateful to Markos for giving me this opportunity.
My time at Daily Kos actually started long before I was an employee. Way back in 2003, I actually had the first diary ever promoted to the front page, and a couple weeks later, I invented the tip jar. My UID, if people still count those things, is a remarkably low 123 (or thereabouts, I forget after all this time). It was a real lifeline to find a home here, because at the time, I was in a rut, having washed out of graduate school, struggling with unemployment, and looking for a way to make something of my life. It was all of you—the blogosphere, the netroots, the Daily Kos community—who ended up making that possible for me. Thank you.
There is a lot I am proud of during my time here, but I don’t want this article to run too long, so I will just give some topline numbers. In these past 14 years, we have raised over $150,000,000 for progressive organizations and Democratic causes, generated over 1.25 billion pageviews via our newsletters, recorded hundreds of millions of actions on every imaginable topic, and signed up over 250,000 GOTV volunteers. I kinda can’t believe that all happened, but it did, and it was because of all of you.
Starting on Monday, June 3, I will be launching my own email-based news and media organization, Bowers News Media. As part of this effort, I am collaborating with Dr. Matthew Kerbel, an old friend and retiring political science professor at Villanova University with whom I co-authored a book many years ago. Matt is the author of the “Wolves and Sheep” Substack, which you should really sign up for here. Together, we aim to bring you efficient, impactful, and accessible news aggregation, grassroots activism, and political analysis. If you would like to join our new venture, you can sign up here.
If you would like to help my new organization get off the ground, the best way you can do so is by signing any and all of these petitions that you agree with:
Finally, I will close by repeating just how grateful I am to all of you. It has been the honor of my working life to direct the activism team here. Thank you all so much, and I wish you all the best of success and happiness.