📣 If My Work Matters to You, This Is the Email I Need You to Read
We keep our reporting free for the world. I need a small group of you to carry the cost.
Family,
If my work has ever mattered to you, this is the email I need you to sit with for a moment.
You’re getting this because you’ve been reading my work for free.
You’ve opened emails about Gaza, Sudan, Congo, police violence, corruption, elders being humiliated in the rubble, children being pulled from beneath concrete. You’ve seen the receipts, the screenshots, the court documents, the leaked memos.
And if you’re still here, it’s because some part of you knows this work matters.
I’m going to ask you, as plainly as I know how:
Please click here to become a member of The North Star today. We keep our reporting free for the world — for readers in Gaza, readers in Sudan, readers living in deep poverty, and kids in middle school trying to make sense of all this. The only way that works is if those who can afford it step up and carry the weight. Your membership keeps this work free for them, and even for you when you can’t afford to pay. If you’re able, please click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.
Where We Actually Are Right Now
I want to show you the real numbers so this doesn’t feel abstract.
Right now, as you read this, The North Star has 3,175 active members.
That’s beautiful to me. That’s 3,175 people who said, “Shaun, I’m not just going to nod along. I’m going to put real support behind this.”
But I also know how many people are on this email list who read everything and have never joined.
If even one out of every twenty people reading this email became a member, we would cross our next big threshold this week. My immediate goal is simple:
3,175 → 3,375 members
I need about 200 of you reading this right now to say, “I’m in.” Not next month. Not “someday.” Today.
Why I’m Asking You, Directly
I did not build The North Star to be a “content brand.” I built it because I could not stand to see our people, and oppressed people all over the world, brutalized with nobody willing to tell the truth clearly, with courage, every single day.
This community has broken stories big outlets were too scared to touch.
We have covered Gaza like the lives there actually matter.
We have followed paper trails on police, prosecutors, and politicians who count on people not paying attention, and we have stayed rooted in moral clarity when powerful people — including some in our own communities — tried to muddy the water.
We don’t have corporate sponsors. We don’t have billionaires quietly paying the bills. It is literally funded by people like you.
If you’ve read our work and thought, “Somebody needs to be doing this,” I’m here to tell you: you are that somebody.
What Your Membership Actually Does
I know asking people for money is sensitive. I know how heavy bills can feel. So here’s what I want you to understand. If you cannot afford it, I am not speaking to you, OK? In fact, it’s for the people who cannot afford it that I am making this request now.
When you become a member, you are not just buying “access to content.” You are:
Giving us the ability to plan and not just scramble.
Helping us hire and retain full-time staff who can dig, fact-check, and build powerful visuals every day.
Keeping our coverage of Gaza, Sudan, police violence, and human rights free and accessible to people who could never afford a paid subscription.
There are readers right now in refugee camps, in overcrowded apartments, in neighborhoods where every dollar is already spoken for — and they get this work for free because somebody else said, “I can give a little each month and hold this up.”
If my work has ever helped you argue your case, explain something to your children, speak up at your job, or stand your ground in a hard conversation, I’m asking you to match that value with action and click here to become a member.
I Don’t Want This Work to Be a Miracle Every Month
Right now, every time we pay our people, cover our software, our research tools, our infrastructure, it feels like a small miracle.
I don’t want this work to survive on miracles.
I want it to survive on commitment.
I want to know that when I go as hard as I possibly can on a story — when I put names and faces and corporations on blast, when I take those risks — there is a stable base of members who have my back, and who have our team’s back.
And I want you to know that joining doesn’t have to be complicated. It takes about a minute. You choose whether you want to support monthly, annually, or as a founding member, and you pick a level that fits your life and your budget.
If you’ve been telling yourself for months you were “going to get around to it,” let this be the moment you actually do it.
Please click here to become a member, or if you can stretch a bit further, click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.
This Is the Part Where I Look You in the Eye
Family, I know you don’t owe me anything.
You could close this email, keep reading for free until the end of time, and I would still do this work because it’s who I am and what I believe I’m on this earth to do.
But I also know this: I cannot do it at this level, with this depth, and with this consistency, without you.
I’m not asking everyone. I’m asking the small percentage of you who feel that tug in your chest right now — the people who already know they are meant to support this.
If that’s you, please don’t ignore that feeling.
Become member number 3,176, or 3,200, or 3,250 — wherever you land on that line, you will know you stepped forward when it mattered.
Please click here to become a member or click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.
And if you can’t join today, I understand that too. Forward this email to three people you know who care about truth and justice, and tell them in your own words why this work matters.
Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun
