Yesterday was a very exciting day — Vox.com announced that I would be joining them next month as a senior reporter covering domestic social policy. It’s a dream job, and the announcement itself, written by my soon-to-be editor Libby Nelson, was extremely kind.

I’ll get to stay covering the topics readers of this newsletter know I care about —schools, housing, childcare, criminal justice, labor. I will definitely continue to write about those areas as they relate to politics, but my writing on political campaigns itself, which was always fairly limited and mostly concentrated during election season, will probably end for the foreseeable future.

I am really happy about this next chapter. I can tell you that the number of outlets interested in real policy journalism feels like it dwindles every year, at least the ones outside of a paywall, which is important to me. I’ve watched shops close up entirely, or editors simply change their preferences for that type of work. Editors may love to run pieces on buzzword slogans like “Green New Deal” or “Medicare for All” but zeroing in on the mechanics of what that actually means, is harder and harder to do outside of a few positions, and it’s really unfortunate. So I feel really lucky and I take this opportunity very seriously.

I start April 4! Two days after that I turn 30. I’m really hopeful that this will allow me to do work I’m proud of, but also at a more sustainable pace with security.

Which brings me to this newsletter — I started this in March 2018, exactly four years ago, about six months into my full-time freelancing effort. I’ve always conceived it as a way to help me distribute my reporting, connect with readers, and try to earn a little bit more to help make the shaky economics of independent journalism work. For those who were so generous to pay, thank you so, so much. I’ll be turning off paid subscriptions today so if you were donating monthly, those payments will end now, and if you paid for annual subscription and want to get any of your money back, feel free to email me and I can figure out that process. I hope that you will consider redirecting that money into either another freelancer’s fund, or a local news outlet in your city. Ideally both!

Starting next month if you want to follow my work you’ll be able to go to my forthcoming Vox “author page” where my articles will be. That said, I’m not going to delete this newsletter, at least I don’t have plans to right now, and I’ll still use it to send out stories by email and postscript thoughts about the reporting. My hope actually is that it might be easier to share deeper thoughts in that kind of more stable situation. It was hard to carve out bandwidth to write more while juggling all the things freelancing entails. That said, I also heard from many of you that you like the short emails, and I totally get that. (I also often cannot handle reading even a medium-length notes certain days.)

Please do continue to send me ideas and questions and feedback! Some of my favorite stories I’ve published have come from tips from this newsletter.

This also isn’t goodbye yet to freelancing. I still have a few more pieces in the works, including a story I worked very hard on from the beginning of November through the end of February! I will send that out later this month. And I published a story last week in Bolts Magazine, a new nonprofit publication launched to focus on local news, criminal justice and voting rights. My story looks at Boston as a new frontier for granting non-citizens with legal status to vote. Plus given the way the media industry works, it’s entirely possible I’ll be freelancing again one day. Journalists are inevitably going to cycle in and out of different roles, which is also why I so strongly believe in the union movement for media because we’re all in this together. Thank you, as always!

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Rachel's Notebook

a new job! & future of this newsletter