Become a member

Support The SLR

Since 2014, The Sunday Long Read has shared over 8,000 (oh my!) pieces of fantastic journalism, and we’ve been continually wowed by the words of thanks and encouragement we’ve received in return.

Now, we’re ready for the next step, and we’re asking for your help! To sustain The Sunday Long Read, support independent writers, and continue sharing high-quality journalism in a free newsletter, we are dependent upon support from readers like you.

Become a member of our Sunday Long Read team today. You can support us for $5 per month or $50 a year.

Want to gift a Sunday Long Read membership? You can do so here on a monthly or yearly basis (and thanks!). Already a member? Well great! You can manage your account here, or make an additional one-time donation.

Don’t want to become a member, but feeling generous? You can make a one-time donation too.

Why become a member? 

So, what are we promising members? Not much (for now) … except the same thing we’ve delivered for seven years and counting: The Best Longform Journalism. Every Sunday.

As the team charted its future, we established three major goals.

(1) Build a stronger connection with our most loyal subscribers

(2) Ensure we continue sharing stories for free with a wide audience

(3) Promote superb writing on a range of topics from a variety of sources.

We think the best way to achieve those goals—to find sustainability despite costly and growing backend fees, and to expand our ambitions to better serve readers—is to develop a robust Sunday Long Read Membership program.

Members will be added to a special email distribution list. They get the newsletter 12 hours early each week, and can expect exclusives—a few extra article picks here, possibly a bonus podcast there, maybe even an original story down the road. As we talked to some of our top subscribers, many told us that an array of perks would not determine their interest in supporting our passion project. Instead, we should double-down on the Sunday newsletter that brought you here in the first place. So that’s what we’re doing!

We want to provide the newsletter for free for as long as we can. Our favorite emails are from aspiring writers, the type of audience we’d hate to lose by going behind a paywall.

All of that said, we expect the benefits of being a member to grow over time. And our members will be deeply involved in helping us map out that path.

Where does the money go?

Great question!

Since 2014, this project has grown from a weekend endeavor handled by Don and Jacob to now include a full staff of senior editors, a bunch of producers who build the newsletter every week, as well as more than 100 esteemed contributing editors who pitch in from across the journalism landscape. Each helps us fulfill the mission we established when we first started—to spread the word about the great stories being told across the web.

Here is a little bit of background on what it takes to produce The Sunday Long Read. We love doing it, but we’d like to at least recoup our costs and ideally help out the young volunteer team members who make everything possible.

Money Spent

• Newsletter Hosting Fees: $3,500/year

• SLR Originals Program: $20,000/year

• Media Subscription Fees: $1,000/year

• Website Fees: $700/year

• Podcast Fees: $2000/year

Time Spent

• Finding Stories: 15 hours/week

• Producing the newsletter: 10 hours/week

• Producing the podcast: 8 hours/episode

• Web maintenance and social media publishing: 5 hours/week

Got questions, or interested in supporting us another way? E-mail us.