Four years ago today, I put the finishing touches on The Assembly’s first newsletter, a package of eight stories ranging from a profile of Phil Berger to an exploration of the North Carolina Zoo.
That first year, The Assembly published one longform story a week. They were 3,000 words or more on something interesting and complicated. It was simple and terrifying. I remember a lot of panic. There were days when the site would randomly crash and weeks when stories would be delayed and we had nothing to send. The dreaded story gap.
Today, as we end our fourth year, there’s still a healthy amount of urgency. Just about different things.
That’s because, as we’ve done the work, we’ve grown our ambition. There’s just a lot to do in North Carolina.
We decided that occasional deep-dive reporting is necessary but not sufficient. North Carolina needs daily reporting in its cities, investigative reporting into its institutions, features about emerging solutions, and critiques about what’s going wrong and right in a state of 10.5 million people.
That need has led us to build, acquire, and partner with local teams across the state including Fayetteville, Wilmington, the Triangle, Greensboro, and the Sandhills. It’s made us launch newsletters covering higher education, the courts, and double down on our state politics coverage.
Our mantra when we launched was to do fewer things, better. We kept our time and resources focused so each story you read was exceptional.
Our challenge today is how do we do more things, at the same level of quality.
We want to be your essential news subscription if you’re an engaged North Carolinian. That means giving you as a reader more of what you want and need.
Our core focus will always be unusually good longform journalism about the things that make this state what it is. It’s the step-back story that helps you understand the context.
But thanks to our expansions over the last year, we can add to that by also giving you insider reporting on your industry and daily coverage about your city.
Today we have 110,000 readers on our different newsletters. We’re set to publish more than 3,000 stories this year at the regional and state level. We’ll document recovery in Western North Carolina, state political fights, federal policy impacts, and human stories across the state.
We’ll work to be the essential place to get your news and information, all while working with our friends and partners across the state.
But our open secret is that we’re not yet financially sustainable. The first five years of start-up life are often the most fickle. There are lots of threats—from fluctuating revenue, to navigating organizational growth, to fighting off potential lawsuits—that we’ll need to navigate.
I sometimes hear a sense of relief from readers and supporters that we’ve “figured it out.” We haven’t, at least not yet. Our ability to continue growing is not assured.
We’ve even taken some risky steps as we’ve grown because we believe that trying to build a large, ambitious, independent statewide news network is worth it. But we know we’re not doing an inevitable thing. This will only work if people keep stepping up to help us, including advertisers, donors, sources, and most importantly, subscribers.
There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing every day than trying to build and grow a local news source for North Carolina. That’s a feeling shared by everyone on our team and by the numerous people who have given their time and energy, for free, to help us solve problems and grow.
Thanks for being a part of making this possible by reading, sharing, subscribing, and sustaining. We wouldn’t be here without you.
Together, I’m optimistic that we’ll be reflecting in four more years about a local news landscape that rivals the newspapers of old and gives readers like you the information and power to navigate your life and the politics of this state.
Kyle Villemain is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Assembly. He is a former speechwriter who grew up in the Triangle and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill.