Liberal Currents in 2026

The intensification of our national crisis in 2025 brought a great deal of change to Liberal Currents, as we gained attention, financial support, and new authors. We started our Neon Liberalism podcast at the end of 2024 and added Half the Answer in March.

We grew, organically, by quite a lot. And then, of course, we began our fundraiser.

Now that the new year has begun, I'd like to share what we are going to do differently given how our situation has changed.

Essays and articles

We began 2025 paying our authors a flat $125 per piece published. By midyear, we had increased that to $200. Though we continued to grow, we kept it at that rate as we figured out what we were going to do about paying editors. With the fundraiser, we have begun to bootstrap that side of things, so it is time once again to revisit the author rate.

We are not just going to be updating our rate, however. Up until now, we had no real policy on word count. Things could be as long as they needed to be or as short as they needed to be, and we paid the same rate. You might think this incentivized people to send us a lot of short pieces—but closer to the opposite has been the case.

Moving forward, we're going to take a two tiered approach.

• We will pay $200 for articles that are 1500 words or less
• We will pay $350 for essays that are longer than 1500 words
• We will aim to publish 3 articles per week and 1 essay per week
• In the lion's share of cases we will insist that a submission must be an article, not an essay

The tiering will begin for all new pitches starting today. Getting on the actual cadence of three articles and one essay per week will take some more work on our end, but will hopefully be in place no later than the first week of February.

As always, please send your pitches to writers@liberalcurrents.com. We will be publishing some more formal guidelines for pitching us and writing for us soon, but the general process is to give a simple yes or no for seeing a first draft based on the pitch, then to review that draft to determine if we're going to move forward from there.

The topics in scope for us can be quite broad, but should have something to do with liberalism as an ideal, a political philosophy, a way of understanding and resisting the current administration, or a guide for the future. If you are unsure that your topic fits this general criteria, just reach out and ask; we'd rather take the time to consider it and turn you down than miss out on an opportunity to publish good work.

The Reconstruction Papers

We discussed this a month ago, but we are actively working on producing an essay collection that, all together, provides a comprehensive vision for reconstructing liberal democracy in America better than it was before.

We are telling authors that their first drafts are due by the end of March. We hope to publish two to three months after that, but we're still working on obtaining a vendor for the printed product and determining the logistics there will be the lion's share of figuring out our specific timing.

We will pay $500 per essay on these given the higher visibility we hope for the project to have and given that we will be selling each issue rather than making them available for free.

This will be the first time we have ever done anything like this, but it will also be a trial run for print issues in general. If all goes well, we will almost certainly do another print issue of some kind, though whether we will do so in 2026 is impossible to say at this stage.

Video and audio

We are going to establish a regular schedule for the podcast releases, which are now on an "as soon as they are ready" schedule that sometimes means we're doing more than one episode in a week and sometimes means we're missing a week. I am still working with the hosts and so won't announce specifics just yet, but there will be a specific day each week that each one comes out on, and only one. The Editors Chat will also get a fixed schedule, and we'll aim to get a more full featured solution for live streaming and sharing the recording with patrons afterwards by February.

We're going to do a lot more video in 2026 in general. We want to expand our reach as far as we can, and it's not exactly a novel observation that video is the most impactful media channel. Articles and essays will remain the central pillar of what we do, but we've already started putting out more short videos, which we will continue to expand on, while looking into video essays and occasional public live streams as well.

The Opposition Report

The Opposition Report, which is available even to our lowest patron tier, is going to be run by Liberal Currents regular Chance Phillips starting this month. Chance has the chops to take this to the next level, and I've very excited to send out his first one soon. You should consider signing up at our Patron tier so you don't miss it. Even better, sign up at our Community Patron tier so you can access it, The Editors Chat, and our Discord server!

Merchandise

Something I am hoping to roll out this month is a store for buying simple merchandise from us (shirts and mugs and the like). The featured image on this piece is a design I commissioned to put onto merch (credit to rimidar for the phrase).

From a planning perspective I am entirely focused on paid patrons in thinking about how to make Liberal Currents into a sound business that pays for itself and at least two full time editors from this year forward. I will not count on revenue from either merchandise or things like sales of The Reconstruction Papers. But doing the latter is mission critical, while merchandise is just a low hanging fruit to give ourselves the opportunity to bring in more revenue.

If you aren't already a patron or free subscriber, make sure to sign up for updates if you want to make sure you hear about our merchandise as soon as they're available!

Putting ourselves out there

In general we will do more marketing and PR than we have ever done. We will try to get on the podcast and YouTube circuit. We will try to get time on more traditional television news. We will attend conferences and work to get ourselves on panels. Doing this full time will mean more than a reliable pipeline of articles, essays, and episodes; it will mean we can do all of the things one needs to do to spread awareness and grow our audience and revenue. Things we simply did not have time to do when Liberal Currents was already a second, unpaid job we were all working.

That said, we are still working towards reaching our goal. We're going to keep the public fundraiser going until we hit $500,000 or the end of January, whichever comes first. Reaching 33% of a $500,000 goal is an incredible demonstration of the enthusiasm, support, and trust for us that exists, and I'm optimistic that other donors will come off the fence now that we're beyond the holidays and we have this accomplishment to show to them.

We're going to do big things in 2026. The tide is turning against the administration, but there is much more to be done. We are going to put your donations to good use, being a more and more significant part of that work.