We launched The Dispatch in 2019 as a digital media company with three primary products: a website, newsletters, and podcasts. The goal was to create a place where thoughtful readers can come for conservative, fact-based news and commentary that doesn’t come either through the filter of the mainstream media or the increasingly boosterish media on the right. Importantly, we wanted to build a genuine community, with regular engagement between those of us who work here and the readers and listeners who pay our salaries.
The internet puts an unimaginable amount of information at our fingertips, and yet it makes knowledge and wisdom harder to grasp. Social media connects people in meaningful ways, but also manages to make it more difficult for us to understand each other. It is less a World Wide Web linking us all together than an accelerant, quickening trends long in the works. Our confidence in the institutions that once anchored us was declining even before the internet became a fixture in our lives, but its arrival has only made us feel even less fixed to a common landscape.