On November 27, 2023, with a U.S. presidential election nearly a year away, WOLA’s border and migration program embarked on a “rapid response” strategy to add facts and context to the narrative about one of the upcoming campaign’s main issues.

That day, we published the first of what would be 185 “Daily Border Links” posts totaling over 150,000 words (plus the link citations).

• Each one was a summary of that day’s U.S.-Mexico border-related news: breaking developments and deeper analysis pieces, with fully cited links below each item.
• Each was just a few hundred words: a quick read, most of the time produced by about 9:00 or 10:00 Eastern each weekday.
• I would then share them on WOLA’s Border Oversight microsite, on my own blog, and—as up to four attached images of each page’s text—on seven social media sites (Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Tumblr).
• I would also share them with three mailing lists: two NGO coalition listservs, and a Google Group open to the public. (You can still sign up for that and get WOLA’s Weekly Border Updates, which we’ve been producing since 2020.)

This was a key part of our “rapid response” strategy because it forced me to do the reading and to be excruciatingly up to date on every development and data point. It was an excellent tool for reaching journalists and fellow activists, experts, and service providers. It helped shape some news coverage, and I know that many people in government were reading it.

The idea was to run the Daily Border Links for a year, through U.S. Election Day, and then shut them down and move on. I would entertain the idea of continuing them if the level of demand and engagement was spectacular.

In the end, the level of demand for the “links” posts was healthy enough to have made it more than a worthwhile effort. But it was not overwhelming enough to merit continuing it beyond the election campaign year.

Here’s an evaluation of the experience:

The good

• As a rapid response strategy, the Daily Border Links succeeded in reaching journalists and NGO partners. It appeared to reach U.S. executive branch officials quietly: they knew about it but rarely interacted with them. Legislative staff give much more frequent feedback on our weekly updates, which are actual narratives, rather than on annotated links like the dailies.
• Having to write these each weekday kept me super sharp, which made my “post-9:00 AM” border and migration advocacy work far more effective. I know so much about what’s happening, in alarming detail. It made me a good interview, I think.
• I didn’t miss a single deeply reported piece, investigation, or NGO or government report. (Though I also see most of those when doing the weekly updates.)
• I’m very proud of the archive that will remain on the web for good. The November-to-November story is a journey from the late-2023 Senate negotiations over the “bipartisan border bill” at a time of record migration, to the bill’s failure, Mexico’s crackdown, all the things the candidates were saying as both tacked rightward, the Biden administration’s body blow to asylum access, and the recent decline in migration. All of this interspersed with innumerable fact checks, deeply reported investigations, and tragedies that people forget after a few news cycles.

The not-so-good

• As noted, the Daily Links did not set the world on fire, traffic-wise, although it’s hard to tell because—since I wanted to get the information out frictionlessly—I shared them in a way that allowed people to read it without me knowing. I used graphics to put the whole thing on social media platforms, and I mailed it to listservs. My analytics service, Plausible, says that just 2,900 people visited the main news archive page in a year, which is not impressive; 4,600 people when you include visits to individual updates’ pages. But I gave people few reasons to visit the site itself, because the same information appeared in so many other formats and on so many other platforms.
• While I created a Google Group mailing list (no cost to me, but not the friendliest format for people without Gmail accounts), I didn’t advertise it except for a link at the top of each post. Still, 158 people signed up between January and now. Between that and listservs, several hundred people got it in their mail every morning. That is good reach for a niche product, but nothing to brag about. (WOLA’s Weekly Updates do a lot better. They’re not as rapid response, and they run long. But Google features them prominently and they often get over 3,000 downloads each. About 1 in 10 exceeds 10,000 downloads.)
• I ended up having to wade through a lot of mediocre content in my daily “gatherings” from news sources (a Twitter list of news posters, RSS feeds, Google News searches). There’s a lot of “boiler room,” “shovel,” “press release,” or “police blotter” reporting out there—especially on Google News—that I’m happy not to have to comb through anymore. What a waste of time.
• Ultimately, it’s not our goal to be a “news service”: we should be active participants in the movement for a rights-respecting, humane, well-managed border.

During key moments like an election year, furrowing our brow to do rapid-response news-digging and analysis made sense, and I know the links posts inspired some good media reporting, alerted allies to emerging trends and challenges, and improved our audiences’ access to facts (if those matter anymore). But now, I need to spend more time on work that is less shallow, that adds more value, and that doesn’t require racing to put something out by 9:00 AM.

Why stop now? Resources.

So now, 347 days after the first post, the last “Daily Border Links” went up today, and there’s no plan to restart. Some colleagues have contacted me to lament this. They have a point: the Trump transition and the first 100 days are a time when our community could really use daily updates.

But WOLA doesn’t have the resources to maintain this pace right now. Like many NGOs that do human rights advocacy without U.S. government funding, we’re in a lean moment.

I suppose I could be convinced to continue producing them if we had specific philanthropic resources to pay for the big investment in staff time they require. However, institutional funders are less interested in backing national-level “narrative work” about borders and migration right now.

You could see the sector-wide lack of resources in major outlets’ campaign coverage, which tended to cite, repeatedly, a small number of border and migration experts. We’re the handful of people who’ve managed to make a living being credible sources of information and clear explainers, while more current and wide-ranging than our counterparts in academia. (No shade to academia, which rewards deeper specialization and a slower, more deliberate pace, not “rapid response” on a spectrum of issues. Imagine trying to do that while teaching a full courseload.)

Without foundation or big individual donor grant money, could we sustain a continued pace of Daily Links posts by charging people to get them, like a Substack model? Perhaps, but I’m not sure the numbers work for something this niche.

For the number of hours I spent on the daily links—news-gathering, reading, writing, all those mailings and social media cross-posts—plus the WOLA infrastructure that makes it possible, I’d conservatively need $3,500 per month. That’s $4,000-4,500 if you include time spent on the weekly updates, too. That would be 400 people paying $10 per month each, or 800 people paying $5 per month.

Given the traffic indicators I mentioned above, that seems unlikely. If we added a paywall (which many Substacks don’t do, asking for voluntary contributions), we’d be shutting down distribution to those who don’t cough up the money, thus negating the original goal of getting friction-free information to as many people as possible.

So that’s more than you probably wanted to know about our foray into producing daily, rapid-response content during an election year. I’m glad I did it, and I’m proud that I never missed a day without giving advance warning first. I certainly don’t rule out doing it again when the need arises.