I spend a great deal of my life reading other people’s mergers, contracts, ownership charts, and corporate filings, which means I should probably be numb by now to the way power rearranges itself on paper before the rest of us feel it in public.
However, I am not.
Lately, I keep coming back to how quickly the machinery that is supposed to tell us what is happening is being bought, sold, merged, and carved up. We see this happening across the studios, the networks, the newsrooms, the platforms, the places where information is gathered, shaped, distributed, and, increasingly, owned by people with very direct interests in how much the public understands. The wall between corporate power and political power keeps getting thinner.
That overlap is the entire beat. The Drey Dossier covers the places where the lines between private money, surveillance, media ownership, and state power stop holding. I read this material constantly, which has burned most of the alarmism out of me. That being said, the pattern is still ugly enough to make me sit up, and I think a lot of you feel it too.
So, to the point. Work like this only stays independent if the people who believe in it fund it directly. Starting today, I’m changing up some of the paid tiers, adding new offerings, and laying the foundation for something we can build together.
First, what isn’t changing: the reporting stays free. No paywalls, no early access, no version where you pay to find out what’s being done to you. I am of the belief that if it’s news, it’s everyone’s, at the same time.
If anything, free readers are getting more than before. Every July 4, I’m publishing The Drey Annual Surveillance Index. It’s a public map of who’s watching Americans, with what tools, under what authority, and who’s getting paid to do it. It’s the thing I keep gesturing at across a year of scattered posts, the whole shape that’s almost impossible to see all at once. Once a year, in one place.
Free, for everyone, and built to actually use.
The paid tiers exist for one reason: to keep this independent, and to keep the reporting free. So much of what you read turns out to be downstream of somebody’s merger or somebody’s owner. The fact that this is funded directly by the people who read it is the entire point.
With that, there are now two tiers:
Rough Rider is $8/month, or $80/year.
It’s for the people who want to support the work and get a little closer to how it gets made. You get the member chat, your name in the credits however you want it to read, and the Monthly Calendar Live. That’s the look-ahead: the hearings, the earnings calls, the court dates, so you see what’s coming before it’s a headline.
For those of you already subscribed, thank you, genuinely. Your rate is locked. Nothing changes for you unless you want it to.
Also, Veterans and military families ride free, always. Just reach out.
Trust Buster is $200/year.
It’s the founders tier; your “speak softly and carry a big stick” tier. By subscribing, you get everything in Rough Rider, plus you will receive an executive producer credit, your name printed inside the annual Index, and a permanent place on the founders page.
Additionally, once a year when the Index drops, you get to join the other founders on a call where I walk you through the whole map: the people, the companies, the contracts, and the parts that only make sense once you lay them next to each other.
If you’re here for the free reporting, I’m glad you’re here, and I mean that. None of that is going away. But if this work has helped you understand the shape of something that felt deliberately confusing, this is the moment to help me keep doing it.
Thank you for caring enough to read closely, ask better questions, and stay with the story after the headline passes.
We ride at dawn.
- Drey
"The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being."
― Theodore Roosevelt
