Hello everyone, NewDem07 here!

Still the same person as on DK, enthusiast in foreign affairs, as well as transportation/urban development, and luckily I was able to retain the same username. Quite fitting, I return from the dead the day after Halloween.

Probably will not be joining the Discord server for the time being, I was a "completionist" back in the DKE era (reading every comment in all the digests), so keeping up with all the conversations would just be too daunting a task. A few hundred posts a day is good enough political diet for me.

In an era where traditional media is in serious trouble (see this week's crisis at the Washington Post for the latest example when corporate ownership interferes with editorial decisions), it is great to see a place where detailed, thoroughly-researched content is presented for all to enjoy. My personal favorite are the quarterly House/Senate fundraising summary charts. To find those manually on the FEC website requires many clicks and then searching through the lines like a 1040 tax form. The best part was, I made some internal predictions on which races would be triaged by the respective party committees, and then a few days later, the DB reported on that very topic!

On a side note, I would like the add the one place where independent news is doing fine is college/university newspapers. Obviously, having a dedicated funding stream is the main factor of stability, but it also helps to have a large pool of workers (students) willing to work for free or at lower rates of compensation. Of course, the coverage is more local-focused, but on larger campuses it can basically serve as the paper of record for the whole city or metro area.