A Special Update

Brad Onishi here with the Axis Daily Brief, and this one’s a little bit different. Over the last four months, we have produced over 50 versions of the Axis Daily Brief, coming to you daily with important religion and politics stories. Over the last week, that’s included Matt Taylor’s discussion of the Antichrists who threaten our freedom. It’s been Holly Berkeley Fletcher talking about the evangelical outrage about Meryl Streep playing Aslan.

We’ve covered a wide range of things this summer, and I’m really, really proud of what we’ve done here. We’ve had nearly a quarter million downloads and views of the show since it launched.

Thousands of you have joined us every morning as you wake up, get ready for the day, and tune in to what’s here. However, we are gonna have to pause the Axis Daily Brief for the time being as we search for more funding in the forms of grants and donations and other revenue. When we started this, as the leader of Axis Mundi Media I committed to paying everyone involved. I wasn’t going to ask people to give their time without remuneration.

You would be surprised how many things go unpaid in this industry. And I was also committed to ensuring that our engineers and everyone behind the scenes was paid in a fair way. What that means is that it’s expensive to do this show because we have amazing people that contribute every morning. Angela Denker’s an accomplished journalist and author.

Holly is an ex-CIA analyst, somebody whose book came out last year and is simply an in-demand personality. Matt Taylor has a new book coming out next week and is one of the leading scholars in the world on the New Apostolic Reformation and Christian supremacy.

When we do these Axis Daily Briefs, we have to put in the time to research the topics and then to write up the article and video script. And then we need to shoot that video and send it over to production. It all takes more time than you might imagine. The average rate we paid folks turned out to be on average $25 an hour. I have not paid myself for any of the briefs I have contributed.

All of that to say, we love doing this work. We believe it makes an impact. So many of you have given us feedback about what it means to you for us to be with you every morning with important stories and coverage of things that often go undetected or simply not covered in other media outlets. One of the best examples was Natalie Harp’s homeschool background and the ways that the Southern California megachurch culture really shaped her worldview - Matt Taylor brought us that. It was the most viewed and seen story that we’ve done on the Axis Daily Brief, and for good reason.

We’re gonna do everything we can to find the means to keep doing this work and to refine the format to figure out how we can do it best with the most impact and the most effect. In the meantime, we’re going to ensure that we’re still here, often with you.

And so let me just tell you about how that works here at Axis Mundi. On Sundays, we have the Sunday interview. And if you’re a paid subscriber, you get an extended version of that interview with myself or Annika Brockschmidt or Leah Payne. On Tuesdays, Matt Taylor and I will keep doing our live show and not only talk about really important stories in religion and politics and Christian nationalism, but also bring on great guests and interviewees. Today we have Mara Richards Bim. She is one of the plaintiffs in the Texas Ten Commandments lawsuit. And she represents her son, who is part of the Texas public school system. She’s also a Baptist minister. On Wednesdays, we’ll keep doing It’s in the Code with Dan Miller. On Fridays, the weekly roundup.

And as the midterms approach, we’ll be planning some live events on Substack where you’ll be invited to hang out with us as we discuss important events. That’ll include live streams and gatherings on other important days as the elections approach us. We want to be present. We want to make sure that the things that we see as shaping our public square are discussed and covered and that you understand what’s going on and why it’s important. So we will be here.

We will be present. We will continue doing the work that Axis Mundi has set out to do. For now, however, this will be our last Axis Daily Brief. I appreciate all of you. I think I speak for the entire team that we’re so grateful to get to do this work because we see it as so meaningful. I want to thank Andrea Hamler, who’s been our engineer and editor behind the scenes for the last four months. I want to thank everyone on the Axis Daily Brief contributor team: Dan Miller, Holly Berkeley Fletcher, Matt Taylor, Thomas Lecaque, and Angela Denker. We’ll be back. Update soon. Appreciate all of you.