Patreon Peek: From My Rocking Chair to Your Mobile Device

Here’s a peek at the latest “Weekend Edition” newsletter, which we send our supporters on Patreon every week. Patrons receive weekly perks including the newsletter and editorial note that follows, early post releases, podcast bonuses, free and discounted merch, local business specials, and more, all chased with the satisfactions of materially supporting quality Thunder content that isn’t awash in clickbait and ads to generate revenue. This week, you can view the full Weekend Edition for free here.

A note from the editor:

I fell in love with Daily Thunder as an online reader, in the earliest sense of the word. I would click a bookmark in my browser, let the page load, and make sure I was caught up on the most recently listed stories one by one. Like many readers who are still with us, on many a game night I would refresh the page late into the night, waiting for Royce’s notes as a final dose of closure for the event.

This stays between you and me, but this is still how I navigate to the website–even visiting to see every new post on the “real” front page.

We are still realizing, eight months later, that Daily Thunder will never exist in that bottle for most of our contemporary audience. If I spend as much time assigning, editing, and prepping three tweets for strategic posting as I do one feature-length article, it results in more than threefold the clicks, shares, and engagement.

The oldschool readers will always remain my peers; I couldn’t quit prioritizing the dotcom if I tried. And I’ll never stop shuddering when I type “engagement”. But as I’ve opened my heart to the whippersnappers who follow and interact with us elsewhere, I’ve discovered that I was wrong to consider Twitter Follower Joe shallow or in any way less serious than Article Reader Jane. As we discussed as an editorial group this week, the hope is that the more people feast on our chopped up content, our reputation for having the writers who know their stuff and show their longform work will undergird that appreciation. Anyone can start a thread about whether Chris Paul deserves MVP votes, but we will always have the article to anchor the discussion when we are kicking it off. Our social audience is full of real ones, as the kids say. Twitter Joe loves Daily Thunder because he really gets what we’re up to, just like Article Jane.

So we’ve ramped up our Twitter activity (considering live tweeting a game assignment on par with an actual writeup), begrudgingly logged into Facebook every week to keep our page alive for our FB faithful (we don’t hold it against them that they rely on our least favorite platform to keep up with us), reached out to Reddit mods and users to understand the best way to participate in that ecosystem, and just launched our Instagram account (!). Just as I knew I’d lean on people with better writing skill and insights to buttress the site, that dependence is tenfold when it comes to the twittering. Olivia & Natasha Panchal, Brandon Rahbar, even my elder owner John Napier, and everyone else we’ve handed the social keys to have raced far ahead of where I could take us in planting a fun, important footprint away from the URL we own.

If you lean on this newsletter or your Twitter feed or the swipe-up feature on some app I don’t know exists to keep up with Daily Thunder, you’re in the majority. If you still click that bookmark and refresh the page, you’ll be welcome on my front porch someday so we can share memories of reading Thunder blogs while the world tried to pass us by.

We love and thank you both for supporting Daily Thunder, whichever way comes natural.

– Cray Allred