How WTF Just Happened Today? Works
A living guide to what WTFJHT is, who it’s for, why it matters, and how it works.
Getting started
Is this free? Yes, WTFJHT is free and 100% sustained entirely through voluntary reader contributions. And, I plan to keep doing this for as long as you keep supporting me (as defined by earning a fair living wage). This is my full-time job. So, if you find my work valuable and find yourself relying on it, invest in the continued production of WTFJHT by becoming a supporting member.
What is your publishing schedule? WTF Just Happened Today? publishes Monday-Thursday, except for federal, market holidays, and some random holidays. Below is the 2026 publishing schedule (and I reserve the right to take additional days off or amend the schedule as needed):
- 2026 publishing schedule
- New Year’s Day – January 1
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – January 19
WTF Just Happened Today?‘s Birthday – January 20
Presidents’ Day – February 16
Earth Day - April 22
International Workers’ Day – May 1
Memorial Day – May 25
Flag Day / Trump’s Birthday – June 14
Juneteenth - June 19
Independence Day – July 4
Labor Day – September 7
Indigenous Peoples’ Day – October 12
2026 Midterm Elections - November 3
Veterans Day – November 11
Biden’s Birthday – November 20
Thanksgiving Eve – November 25
Thanksgiving Day – November 26
Christmas Eve – December 24
Christmas Day – December 25
Boxing Day – December 26
New Year’s Eve – December 31
Why don’t you publish WTF Just Happened Today? in the morning? It’s not called WTF Just Happened Yesterday.
I don’t have any money. How can I help? The best way to contribute to the success is to share it with your friends and family. It’s free and has a big impact. Tweet about it or share it on Facebook. The next best way to contribute is to submit copy edits and fact checks using the “Improve this article” link on every blog post.
Why do you use serif font and not sans-serif? Don’t you know sans-serif is the superior typeface? And, yo, what’s up with the red links? Blue links are the standard on the web. Like a newspaper, WTFJHT is black and white and read all over.
What is the technology behind WTFJHT? WTFJHT is built using Jekyll, Cloudflare, GitHub and GitHub Actions, Amazon S3, and MailChimp. This project is open sourced and hosted as a public GitHub repository. Log new issues, comments, feedback here.
I’m running for office, will you share my campaign with your audience? No. My promise to readers is that I’ll tell them WTF just happened today and not push my personal politics. In exchange, members invest in WTFJHT to tell them what happened; not what to think.
I don’t like the word “fuck.” If you’re offended by the word “fuck” on the internet in today’s political climate, then I don’t know what to tell ya.
Editorial standards & practices
What’s the editorial promise?
The job of WTFJHT is simple: say what happened, state the facts, cite the primary sources, and move on. I doomscroll the news so you don’t have to. And then I compress the shock and awe in national politics into a sane, once-a-day update that helps normal people make the news make sense.
How do you decide what’s in the daily update?
I try to approach the daily update like a front page news editor would: focus on what’s timely, what has impact, and what has consequences. You know, journalistic news-value judgement. Practically speaking, WTFJHT covers the news through the lens of the executive branch specifically – and the president in particular – followed by the legislative and judicial branches in general, and in that order.
What counts as “news” for WTFJHT?
Actions and outcomes that have impact that fit the WTFJHT scope. So, laws, orders, rulings, votes, filings, charges, agreements, deadlines, and documented conflicts. I’m less interested in vibes, memes, internet outrage, etc.
Where do you get your information?
I read broadly and try to triangulate on the most important stories of the day that, I think, meet the moment, will withstand editorial scrutiny, and will endure beyond the news cycle. Where possible, I prioritize primary documents and on-the-record statements. And I cite all my sources so you can verify the reporting for yourself.
How do you handle bias and “neutral-ish”?
This is the news through the lens of one person making decisions about coverage. Said another way: Humans making decisions about the relative importance of information is inherently biased. The best way I know how to handle the issue of perceived bias in news is to go back to first principles: journalism is a set of ethics based on trust, truthfulness, fairness, integrity, independence, and accountability. Therefore, my goal is to reflect these journalistic standards, acknowledge my biases, and consistently and transparently cite my sources. In other words, I show my work.
Do you offer commentary, opinion, or analysis?
No. I try to strip out adjectives and adverbs so facts can speak for themselves. My job is to tell you what happened, not what to think.
How do you handle uncertainty and mistakes?
When details are disputed, unverified, or still developing, I try to label that clearly. If I get something wrong or something changes, I update and correct it. The goal is a clear, understandable, and accurate first draft of history.
Why do you include polls?
Polls are not a crystal ball. They’re just probabilities. They provide directional evidence about the opinions, preferences, and attitudes of a representative group of people at a given point in time. That makes polling nothing more than a point-in-time temperature check on reality. To me, it’s no different than your local weather report: Sometimes it’s accurate, sometimes it’s less so, but it’s still useful information as long as you don’t put too much stock in it. If nothing else, polls are useful way to challenge your worldview.
When you link to multiple articles, how do you choose the order?
I try to cite the primary source whenever possible. After that, I include additional sources that confirm the news or add original reporting. Links are roughly ordered based on how much they influenced my summary. As for why you rarely see conservative-leaning sites cited by WTFJHT: most don’t actually break news. They typically reframe the news originally reported elsewhere with commentary.
Why I use “genocide” rather than “war” to describe what’s happening in Gaza. The most authoritative international bodies that have formally investigated the events in Gaza have concluded that Israel’s conduct meets the 1948 Genocide Convention standard. To be clear, this isn’t a personal opinion. Instead, it reflects my deference to the official findings reached by several independent investigations. It’s also worth noting that many who object to the use of “genocide” to describe what’s happened in Gaza typically point to media aligned with Israeli perspectives. While not inherently wrong, I do find that narrowing the debate to partisan media coverage risks trading confirmation bias for evidence, reinforcing preexisting beliefs rather than objectively engaging in the underlying legal and factual record. In an era where “bias” is breathlessly invoked to discredit nearly all reporting, it’s especially important to distinguish between the formal findings from independent investigations, human rights organizations, and legal institutions that operate across ideological lines and the media narratives shaped by politics. That said, the UN-mandated Commission of Inquiry concluded in Sept. 2025 that Israel has committed genocide, identifying four of the five acts listed in the 1948 Genocide Convention and citing statements by Israeli officials as direct evidence of intent. Amnesty International reached the same conclusion after its own investigation, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution stating that Israel’s actions meet the legal definition. Major Israeli human-rights groups, including B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, have issued similar findings. While the International Court of Justice hasn’t ruled yet on whether Israel has committed genocide, it has found that the rights Palestinians hold under the Genocide Convention appear both plausibly and seriously at risk of violation. On that basis, the Court issued binding emergency orders requiring Israel to prevent genocidal acts, and later instructed it to immediately stop its offensive in Rafah and to allow life-saving humanitarian aid into the region. Further, the Convention itself makes genocide a crime “whether committed in time of peace or in time of war,” and international law imposes a duty to prevent genocide once serious risk is evident. So to describe what is happening in Gaza – more than 67,000 people killed and 169,000 injured as of Oct. 2025, with roughly 90% of Gaza’s 2.1 million people displaced into conditions of famine and facing life‑threatening circumstances – as merely a “war” risks repeating the same minimization that enabled the very atrocities the Convention was created to prevent in the first place. To be clear, acknowledging genocide in Gaza doesn’t excuse or diminish Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attacks and war crimes that killed over 1,200 people and took 251 people hostage. These are two independent legal tracks that both require accountability. The Genocide Convention simply makes no exception for self‑defense or counterterrorism, and history shows that waiting for conclusive court rulings, which often take years or decades, has too often meant ignoring atrocities in real time. My responsibility, then, is to use language that’s consistent with the determinations of the UN, leading human rights organizations, and genocide scholars who have already found that the threshold for genocide has been met.
AI policy & boundaries
Is WTFJHT written by AI? No. All content is researched, written, and curated by Matt, an IRL human working out of his basement in Seattle, WA. The editorial judgment, sourcing, writing, and editing of WTFJHT, as well as the personal accountability for corrections, errors, and omissions, will always be uniquely human. Also, the typos are a giveaway that a human wrote it.
Where do you draw the line? What is your AI policy? I’m clear on the distinction between using AI to extend my personal capacity versus using AI to do the work for me.
- What AI is NOT allowed to do: (1) Research, write, or edit WTFJHT, (2) decide what’s news or replace my editorial judgment, (3) “fact check” my work, (4) or publish anything automatically without my review.
- What I am willing to use AI for: (1) Narrate the audio edition using text-to-speech and a clone of my voice, (2) check for typos/grammar cleanup (i.e. spellcheck), (3) help me write and debug code or other technical issues related to the WTFJHT infrastructure, (4) organize non-editorial business ideas and tasks.
Why didn’t you hire a human voice actor for the podcast? I did. For eight years, I paid a human to voice the podcast. I paid them well, spending over $150,000 during that period to produce an audio edition. It generated no direct revenue and, ultimately, it wasn’t a financially viable way to run a small business. So I feel like I exhausted that avenue (for now, at least), and in Jan. 2025 I paused the podcast until I could find a sustainable way of publishing it regularly. In that time AI voice clone technology emerged. The choice was never between “Human Actor” and “AI Voice.” The choice was between “AI Voice” or “No Audio Edition at all.”
Why not just record it yourself? My time isn’t a resource I can scale. As a one-person operation, I spend my entire day doomscrolling the news, writing, and editing the daily edition. Adding the time required to record, re-record, edit, produce, and publish an audio version is physically impossible without sacrificing… well, something. Using a voice clone allows me to scale my labor, which allows me to scale my capacities.
Why not use volunteers? Volunteers aren’t free. They require management: finding people, coordinating their schedules, quality control, project management, the daily production). This is a job. And that job shifts the cost of labor back onto me as a manager, which I don’t have time for.
Why use a voice clone instead of standard text-to-speech? Standard text-to-speech is an accessibility tool. The robotic experience is by design. While that makes for great utility, accessibility and preference are different things. If readers want the straightforward, functional delivery, they can use any TTS tool to listen to WTFJHT. That option already exists and I’ve done my best to ensure the WTFJHT website complies with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Using a clone of my voice to read my work is about offering a different kind of experience. My goal with WTFJHT has always been to help people establish a better, more personal relationship with the news. When readers asked for the audio edition to return so they could listen while commuting, exercising, doing chores, whatever, I wanted to meet that need without sacrificing the work that goes into making WTFJHT. I also want to represent my work everywhere WTFJHT shows up, whether that’s the newsletter, the blog, or your headphones. Not because I’m precious about my voice (lol), but because I believe consistency and accountability builds trust. So when the audio is published regularly and the voice matches the byline, it reinforces that there’s a real person behind the scenes researching, writing, and editing this thing – even when it requires using a clone of my voice to get there. That’s not better or worse than preferring text-to-speech – it’s just different.
What is your stance on the ethics of generative AI? My honest take is that generative AI and the slop people use it for today is lame and cheap. There are, however, some useful and interesting things it can do to enhance a person’s capacities, and I suspect that that will only get better and more capable tomorrow. The ethical and moral dilemmas in and around AI are pretty consequential, and I won’t pretend to have arrived at any sort of coherent personal point of view. However, my guiding principle is this: I use this technology to scale my labor, not replace my labor. I don’t use AI to create thoughts, form opinions, or do acts of journalism. I use AI as a sort of extensible tool to take the work I’ve already done and make it available to more people in more places — all for free and without ads.
Site features
What does the 📌 mean? Where possible, I like to “re-up” news from the past to contextualize a current story without having to regurgitate all the past information. By pinning past abstract summaries in a sequential order below a new news story, we can tell a richer narrative without repeating information you may already know. And if you haven’t been following along or you forgot, then the most salient background information is right there for ya.
What are the ✏️ Notables? WTFJHT is (usually) comprised of two parts: the main section, which is a numbered list of abstract summaries, and the Notables. The main section is typically your largest, most impactful stories of the day threaded together to form some sort of narrative. The Notables, however, are a noting of all the other important stories that happened, but didn’t fit the larger daily narrative. The Notables section was created following reader feedback for more stories in the daily update.
Is there an RSS feed? Yep! Here are links to the RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds.
WTF does it cost to run this thing?
Last updated: August 2025
TL;DR: The baseline budget with no operating reserve is $16,778/month; The sustainable budget with an operating reserve is more like ~$18,876/month.
OPERATING COSTS:
- Hosting & infrastructure (S3, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, etc.): $200/month
- News subscriptions (NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Bloomberg, creator journalists, etc.): $175/month
- Transaction Fees (the unavoidable cost of Stripe fees are 2.9% + $0.30 on every credit card transaction): ~$1,000/month
- Small-business overhead (depreciation, backups, monitoring, training, and other tools): $400/month
- Tools & services (MailChimp, Memberful, Algolia, Osmosys, S3Stat, GitHub, Buffer, Zapier, etc.): $1,679/month
Total Operating Costs: $41,448/year ($3,454/month)
MATT’S LIVING WAGE:
This is a one-person operation, which means your support funds the reporting, writing, editing, fact-checking, production of the newsletter, maintenance of the site and tools, light web development and operations, and audience development — plus all the unglamorous bits like customer support, vendor wrangling, and fixes when things break. It’s all one job. I publish the math because I believe transparency builds trust and you deserve to see how your support translates into the product. In short, my living wage is what it takes for me to show up and do the job.
I spend about half my time on editorial work, with the other half split between product/tech and operations. To arrive at fair compensation, I blend local labor markets for the roles I actually perform, weighted by time. I don’t tack on a monthly “inflation” line item. Instead, I re-index the base periodically and re-run the math so my “pay” roughly tracks real costs without hiding anything. The blended salaries result in a base compensation of $109,045/year ($9,087/month) for someone doing this mix of work in the Seattle, WA area.
In a normal job, an employer pays for benefits like health insurance, retirement match, paid time off, disability and life insurance, professional liability, bookkeeping/tax prep, and admin overhead. As a solo operator, I pay those at “retail” and self-fund PTO. Rather than hiding that inside a bigger salary number, I show it explicitly. Benefits are typically 30–35% of compensation, so I’ll just use the midpoint of 32.5% because that seems fair: 32.5% × $109,045 = $35,440/year ($2,953/month)
And then there’s the self-employment tax. A regular employer pays payroll taxes on top of salary, but when you’re self-employed, you pay both sides (Social Security + Medicare). I don’t include income taxes because they’re household-specific and not a business operating cost anyway. Self-employment tax is 15.3% applied to 92.35% of net earnings: 0.9235 × $109,045 × 15.3% = $15,408/year ($1,284/month)
Total Living Wage: $159,892/year ($13,324/month)
OPERATING RESERVE:
Because reader support is voluntary and variable, a small operating reserve is required to smooth out cash-flow gaps, cover unexpected bills, and account for the general unknown risk associated with running a small business that “sells” a free product. Again, I’d rather publish this explicitly than bury the volatility inside “labor.” The suggested range is 10–15%, so I’ll use the midpoint of 12.5%.
Total Operating Reserve: $25,168/year ($2,097/month)
TOTAL ALL-IN COST TO RUN WTFJHT:
- Operating costs: $41,448/year ($3,454/month)
- Living wage: $159,892/year ($13,324/month)
- Operating Reserve: $25,168/year ($2,097/month)
GRAND TOTAL: $226,508/year ($18,876/month)
A note on non-financial forms of membership: While WTFJHT is free to read, the supporting members unlock access for everyone else. So if you can’t pay right now, that’s totally fine! Please stay. Non-financial forms of membership are just as important and impactful as financial forms of membership! The best way to contribute to the success is to share it with your friends and family. It’s free and has a big impact. But if you can, your membership keeps this independent, ad-free service alive for all.
Become a supporting member.
It's not enough to be a consumer of media. You must be a stakeholder in it. Invest in the continued production of WTF Just Happened Today? by becoming a supporting member. Choose from four recurring membership options below: