The Muckraker focuses on how power, from source to execution, operates inside American institutions – legislatures, courts, administrative agencies, and other systems that shape our lives. We follow the history, the process, and the money to explain complex systems plainly, without talking down, taking partisan positions, or fostering outrage.

We want to explore our Constitution and government to learn where the levers are and how they work so that you, we, actually - the citizens the government is supposed to be of and for - can use them to impact the way we are governed. We aim to lay bare the machine.

In the interest of full transparency, here is how we conduct our research and go through a file.

The Muckraker Method:

Exposure is not enough. To operate a machine, you first have to understand how it was assembled. Every item we publish will flow through this lens, and every deep dive will follow a strict forensic cycle:

Establish the Standard

The Design: What was the original intent? What was the system, law, or institution originally built to accomplish? Primary sources. The Constitutional anchor. This is the baseline for everything that follows.
The Potential: How could this system, agency, institution, or branch of government function if it operated as intended? The Potential section is designed to make the stakes concrete by demonstrating how the failure matters to your actual, daily life.

Document the Reality

The Reality: Building off of the forensic baseline we established in the previous section, we dig into primary sources, synthesize the picture, and simplify the results. This is the forensic section. We will use FOIA requests, PACER logs, SEC filings, and everything in between to document actual examples of the machine breaking in real time. Specific, real-world examples of the gap between design and reality. This is the documentation of the corruptible gaps in our system. Part of the paid tier.

Provide the Levers

The Levers: We provide the Citizen Action Toolkit. We give you the FOIA templates, call scripts, 1-page information sheets, contact information, and raw data to impact your democracy and check our investigations. What the reader can do today with what they just learned. Part of the paid tier.

We use our Design and Potential sections to establish what was supposed to happen — the designed intent, the constitutional anchor, the standard against which the reality will be measured. That’s the forensic baseline. Without it, the Reality section sounds like we’re complaining. With it, the Reality section becomes a finding. And once we have that finding, the Levers section gives every reader some tools to use, whether for talking to their representatives or just to their family members.

We assume our readers are intelligent, capable, and tired of being spoken down to. We’ve designed this cycle to work similarly to the way I used to investigate cases with thousands of pages of documents. And when we’re finished, we provide The Muck - the raw data, spreadsheets, and primary sources – so you can verify our work.

You know, if, like us, you’re into that sort of thing.

Eventually, we will have two tiers of content - a free tier and a paid tier. I expect that to begin sometime around Month 4 as we ramp up to the release of our first big deep dive around that time[^1].

The day we release the first deep dive is the day the subscription tier will begin. Our intention is for our Monday column, Dispatches from Muckraker Lab, to always be free and to be an inside look and preview of what we will be releasing the coming Friday. With the launch of our paid tier around Month 4, Friday’s content will be split. The Design and Potential sections of our investigations will be part of the free tier, but a paid subscription will be required to access the Reality and Toolkit sections. As the lab keeps churning out investigations, this subscription becomes more than just access to our weekly work, but access to our full archive of past investigations, Citizen Action Toolkits, and all of the raw data we collected.

We hope you’ll subscribe to the free tier because you find these things entertaining and informative. However, the research, data pulls, and other investigative avenues we pursue require time, effort, and money. That is why we have to charge for the Reality section, along with the archive, raw data, and the Citizen Action Toolkit. We hope you’ll find these sections indispensable, worthy of recommending to friends and colleagues, and worth paying $9.00 per month or $90.00 per year to access.

Free and paid tier versions of a podcast will roll out in the future, once we get our legs under us and I figure out how to turn on this microphone.

Our weekly rhythm will be something like this:

Monday: Dispatches from Muckraker Lab. Our Monday column will find some entertaining ways to preview Friday's deep dive topic and consider a few news stories from independent media around the country to see how they relate. Fridays will be where the heaviest lifting resides, but Mondays will preview those topics with a lighter touch so don’t completely lose our collective sense of humor.
Tuesday: On Tuesdays we will be in the lab, immersed in the documents, data, and detritus of our current topic. This is where we start to summarize information from PACER, the FEC, FOIA returns, primary sources, enabling statutes, floor vote records, and anything else that sheds light on the way the government is functioning. We’re reading the data and noting what matters. This is where Friday’s article gets built — document by document, not assertion by assertion.
Wednesday and Thursday: These are writing days in Muckraker Lab. We synthesize what we learned from all those documents — the voting record, the donor list, the agency rulemaking, the constitutional text, the Federalist Papers — and we put the full picture together. This is where the Design and Potential sections connect to the Reality section. The synthesis is our finding: here is what it was supposed to be, here is what it is, and here is why the gap exists.
Friday: The week’s Deep Dive, and specifically the Citizen Action Toolkit for the paid tier, is published on Friday. This is where The Muckraker tries to hand our readers simplified and accurate versions of the underlying complexity without requiring them to have to read every page of data for themselves. The article is the outline. The toolkit items are the levers. We do the complex work so you don’t have to.

Our method, structure, and tiering operate as guardrails to stay honest to both the details and the bigger picture at the same time.

That’s how we operate and what The Muckraker is trying to do for its readers. A lot of good journalism is reactive by design. Watchdog reporters, however few remain, are still the first line of defense when it comes to the day-to-day operations of our government. We are trying to be proactive, to use our skills and abilities to dig specifically into how our government functions and whether it truly lives up to its design.

I don’t think that Democracy is dying quite so much as I think it is being sold. Or maybe auctioned. Either way, at The Muckraker we want to gather the receipts and let citizens do with them what they will.

Footnotes

[^1]: Much more to come on that after our official launch in mid-May.