Why Does Notes on the Crises Have A Manhattan Office Now? A Blueprint for the Future

I have been very overdue in telling readers my plans in greater detail. I was going to put out this piece laying out what my plans for Notes on the Crises out last Sunday, but alas I got sick more than a week ago and it took me more than a week to recover.

Which, I guess, is a good place to start. I’ve been working on average at least 60 hours a week since the Trump-Musk Payments Crisis started January 31st. Probably closer to 70 hours if I’m honest. I’ve done a lot to manage my health and keep myself sane in this process; what I got sick with was unrelated to how much I have been working. Nevertheless, the reality is this amount of work is unsustainable in general. The past week of being sick is the longest continuous break I’ve taken from work since the second Trump administration started. Sooner or later I will crash if I try to keep up the depth and breadth of coverage I’ve (more or less) sustained on my own. As long as Notes on the Crises is just a name for what Nathan Tankus is writing, it will always be subject to these kinds of hiccups. Which is why I want to grow Notes on the Crises beyond the "Nathan Tankus show".

Yet, what Notes on the Crises has become a vehicle for is absolutely essential. My work has been cited in congressional letters, multi-state attorney general lawsuits, and gotten citation and acknowledgement across the media landscape. I’ve been everywhere. As I covered a few weeks ago, New York City’s lawsuit of the Trump administration over debiting New York City’s bank account for 80.5 billion dollars of congressionally appropriated funds was completely rewritten based on the memo I commissioned for my second Rolling Stone piece.

I would like to get to the point where Notes on the Crises is still functioning when I’m out of commission. Or, god forbid, during a vacation. To make Notes on the Crises sustainable, I need to either expand or do less. I chose expansion when I signed a lease on this office last month.

Hence why I made the leap to not just renting an office near my apartment but renting 2000 square feet. I got a great deal and I could not pass up the opportunity. One of the things I am doing with the Notes on the Crises office is creating a place for people to gather and talk about our various, well, crises. I also wanted to facilitate many people collaborating together on overlapping projects regarding this constitutional crisis. It's a lot easier to ask someone a question, or get their input, when they are in the same physical space. 

At the same time, I am nowhere close to the financial- or administrative- position to hire people. Instead, I’m setting up the office to have many desks with external monitors, keyboards and mice that can be connected to a laptop with just one USB C wire (and a bluetooth connection). This way people can come in and out of the space to work as they please and I can benefit from conversations and insights with many many people. These people range from other journalists, to volunteers, freelancers and beyond. I am going to have two offices dedicated to these desks, which readers will see photos of when they are completed.

This Notes on the Crises office is also in the process of becoming a place for undergraduates, graduate students and law students to gather and intern this summer, as well as in the fall. Some of these interns may even write guest pieces for Notes on the Crises based on what I have them researching! Newsletter writing is a lonely affair and there is no place in New York City to go get- for free!- intellectual engagement on the array of topics I have gained expertise on; Let alone intellectual engagement at the intersection of all this different expertise. No place, that is, until now. A media publication with a physical office in Manhattan is, to say the least, not something one does in isolation.

Most importantly though, I’m already expanding my coverage in ways that the office facilitates. Anisha Steephen, former senior adviser to the Treasury under Biden, is starting a multi-part series on the Internal Revenue Service and DOGE’s attacks upon it for Notes on the Crises. This series exemplifies the reasons I chose expansion over shrinking. I asked for IRS sources way back on February 18th. I quickly got a half dozen former and current sources but got too overwhelmed by the labor involved in learning from these sources and continuing my other reporting. However, I never forgot about this essential part of the Federal Government and had been on the look out for someone to take on IRS coverage. Anisha Steephen is the perfect person but, frankly, I am getting the benefit of their expertise only because of their sense of public duty. Snapping up other people like Anisha will require greater financial resources. 

Meanwhile, I’m also going to be doing much more audio/video “content” from the office. For one thing, my personal office’s book shelf serves as a far better background. More importantly though, I plan to have more open-ended conversations with guests recorded in my conference room. I’m even contemplating getting into “livestreaming” and answering Notes on the Crises reader questions live “on stream”. The Krugman interviews make clear that there are many, many people who get a lot more out of open-ended conversations about my writing than the writing itself- which is a good thing! I write both for a broader audience and to inform journalists, government employees, law firms and yes, even Wall Street about the extraordinary dangers most people are asleep to. It’s a very tricky balance to strike and talking directly to that broader audience is, in some sense, a relief. Those Krugman interviews have, incidentally, led to Notes on the Crises becoming “monetized” on Youtube. Thus frequent office livestreams, chopped up into many Youtube videos, will add another revenue stream.

To expand coverage to other government agencies I will need a combination of new business models and more funding. Notes on the Crises has an extremely exciting expansion plan involving a publication that already exists and a unique business model that will be announced in June. This will open my coverage up to multiple important agencies I have not touched with my writing so far. It will also fit extremely well with my intention to get into livestreaming for reasons that will become clear. Reader support has also made this opportunity one I could take advantage of. A website redesign 

To get to the point where I can afford to have people working full time on various beats I need to branch out while still accumulating a bedrock foundation of paid subscribers. They are what let me take chances like the ones I have in the works and to have the safety net to take other opportunities. Some of those opportunities will be grants or donations. Readers may recall this surreal interaction towards the end of Paul Krugman’s first interview with me:

Krugman: Yeah, I was actually wondering who they'd leak it to if not you. I mean, if you get hit by a truck, how do we know if this has happened?

Tankus: Well, I'll put this pitch out there. If someone out there who's watching this or reading the transcript wants to put up a budget, $500,000 or a million to train up people and, you know, make me replaceable, I'm more than eager to train up my redundancies. 

Krugman: This will be in the transcript. That's actually, it is scary.

I can’t talk about my efforts here in detail until they fully bear fruit, but getting those kinds of dollar amounts ultimately requires new organizational relationships (if you would be interested in making a donation to a 501(c)(3) to support Notes on the Crises Investigative Journalism and/or research, email me at crisesnotes@gmail.com to discuss further). 

I am also going to start doing ticketed in-person Notes on the Crises events. These will involve various levels and audiences, with my highest end events held at special places like the American Numismatic Society where I get to, among other things, show off monetary objects throughout history. In fact, I have tickets to sell for an event just this week. I would have let free subscribers get a chance to buy them a full week ago but … I got sick. Expansion is about getting many of these tasks out of my hands. (Free email subscribers will get an email offering to buy tickets, along with the details regarding the event, shortly).

This is kind of a tricky position to engage readers from. On one hand, I’m saying that Notes on the Crises needs to reach financial resources beyond my current audience’s subscriptions. At the same time, I’m telling you, the reader, that your subscription is absolutely essential. Your subscription helps keep Notes on the Crises completely independent from potential grantors, donors or wealthy subscribers. Reader subscriptions give me the security of knowing that I can always turn down money-with-strings and still be able to support this office and compensate freelance writers. That absolute independence, combined with my current and former governmental sources, as well as my unique knowledge base, are the special ingredients which make Notes on the Crises such a powerful force.

The big picture here is that, while expanding Notes on the Crises is exciting, I’m not doing it for myself. In many ways it would have been easier, more comfortable even, to just take the rise in subscriptions as a nice windfall- a reward for years of hard work. Take one of those aforementioned vacations. The reason I didn’t make that decision is that the very thing leading to paid subscriptions for Notes on the Crises have been the things that have motivated me to work so hard. We are still in the middle of an intensifying constitutional crisis. This constitutional crisis involves many obscure, hard to understand systems that our media ecosystem is not equipped to handle. 

There are so many unfinished threads just from what I’ve covered so far. I think I’ve stumbled upon something that needs to exist in the world. Something bigger than myself which, with the right resources, can be unfurled from my mind and become dossiers and rulebooks for investigative research and journalism. I want to be able to, someday, say that even if I get “hit by a truck”, a government employee can still leak to Notes on the Crises and someone will know what to do with the information. Every move I have made since the Trump-Musk Payments Crisis started-and will make from here on out- is with that central goal in mind. We’ve made a lot of progress in the past 40 days or so since the lease started and I’m confident that Notes on the Crises will continue to thrive: thanks to your help and support. The enthusiasm- and paid subscriptions- of my readers are what made this audacious leap thinkable, so thank you.