Jonesing on Nonprofits
Good morning nonprofit law prof blog readers. Today, I am announcing that my part of this blog is moving to Substack. When this blog first started – it was David Brennen’s great idea years ago — the plan was that a group of law professors would rotate through a blogging schedule, with each of us posting for one week at a time. The blog went through occasional doldrums, during which times it contained very few posts for weeks. Eventually, I became convinced that our day jobs and our varied schedules would not allow our blog to gain the consistency that would make it a “go to” source. So I began to blog daily.
For the last two years, I have been blogging consistently every weekday; blogging about nonprofit law has become a labor of love and I hope my posts have matured. The blog is consuming more and more time and yet I still enjoy it very much. Even as I migrate my part of this blog to Substack I hope to continue contributing to the Nonprofit Law Professor Blog, but only during my assigned week. If that becomes too much along with my own blog, I will have to let it go.
My Substack publication is called “Jonesing on Nonprofits” and my goal is to make it the daily rag for those who follow and practice nonprofit state and federal tax and non-tax law. As with this blog, Jonesing will include a sprinkle of international news as well. My goal is to make it more intensely useful and entertaining to readers.
Currently, the Substack page is configured without a paywall and all posts are free and open to the public. I spent the weekend becoming familiar with the platform and there is one post up now – a story borrowed from this blog. New stories will appear starting tomorrow. After a week or two, the blog will be entirely subscription-based (because a brother has bills!), with different rates for commercial (.com) and nonprofit (.org and .edu) subscribers. I am not quite sure how to accept paid advertising yet, but I hope to gain that capability soon. As always, my posts will include links to primary source documents – petitions, briefs, cases, statutes, final and proposed regs, administrative rulings, and all the things that contribute to the entire body of nonprofit law. It will also include analysis and commentary, as the spirit moves me.
I must seem arrogant to think that people will pay to read my posts, but others – namely the pioneering Paul Streckfus, who declined my invitation to join together – have traveled this path before me. I figure why not me too. Even Tax Notes must have started off as a crazy arrogant idea. Who would ever want to read a magazine about taxes anyway?
The Nonprofit Law Prof blog has nearly 200 subscribers. And I am told that members of the Exempt Org Committee get weekly emails with links to new posts. I never really worried about that stuff before. Far more people than just subscribers or listserv members read the blog daily. Currently, the blog is averaging about 1500 clicks per day from a low of about 250 per day three years ago. The number of unique visitors has steadily increased to about 550 per weekday. The blog has regular visitors from 8 or 9 different countries, IRS attorneys, large and small firms, accountants, practitioners, state AGs, scholars, and even Senate staffers every now and again.
I hope that readers will follow me to my new blog, while also continuing to read the NLPB.
darryll k. jones