How WTF Just Happened Today? Works
A living guide to what WTFJHT is, who it’s for, why it matters, and how it works.
Last updated: September 2025
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 2025 publishing schedule (and I reserve the right to take additional days off or amend the schedule as needed):
- 2025 publishing schedule
- New Year’s Day – January 1
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – January 20
WTF Just Happened Today?‘s Birthday – January 20
President’s Day – February 17
Earth Day - April 22
International Workers’ Day – May 1
Memorial Day – May 26
Flag Day / Trump’s Birthday – June 14
Juneteenth - June 19
Independence Day – July 4
Labor Day – September 1
Indigenous Peoples’ Day – October 13
Veterans Day – November 11
Biden’s Birthday – November 20
Thanksgiving Eve – November 26
Thanksgiving Day – November 27
Christmas Eve – December 24
Christmas Day – December 25
Boxing Day – December 26
New Year’s Eve – December 31
New Year’s Day 2026 – January 1
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 copyedits and fact checks using the “Improve this article” link on every blog post.
Editorial Process
How do you decide what’s in the daily update? I try to approach the daily update like a front page editor at a newspaper would: focus on timeliness, impact, prominence, importance, conflict, and unexpectedness. This is further refined by framing WTFJHT’s scope of coverage to the curiouser and curiouser news from in and around executive branch politics in particular – not necessarily politics in general. Together, WTFJHT serves as a single, daily summary of the most important events regarding the White House.
Where do you get your information? I read broadly, visiting the homepages of (in no particular order) the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, NPR, CNN, NBC News, CNBC, ABC News, CBS News, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Axios, Daily Beast, Reuters, Associated Press, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and more. I use several tools to surface links frequently shared across the social web. And, finally, I built Current Status to aggregate recent, highly-cited stories, with an emphasis on original reporting, depth, and accuracy. Together I try to triangulate on the most important stories of the day that meet the moment, will withstand editorial scrutiny, and endure beyond the news cycle.
Why do you include polls? Don’t you know that polls are biased/inaccurate/not to be trusted/unreliable/fake??? 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 you didn’t have before. Just don’t put too much stock in it. (e.g. Except clear skies with highs in the low-70s. Wind will be light and variable out of the North-Northeast at 5 mph.) If nothing else, polls are useful to gut check and challenge your worldview.
When you link to multiple articles, how do you choose the order of the links? What is your criteria for doing so? I try to cite the primary source of reported news whenever possible – usually major media organizations with the resources to actually break and report news, like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNBC, The Guardian, etc. After citing the primary sources, I also include secondary sources that either confirm the news or add original reporting. I then “rank” the sources in parentheses based on how much they influenced my summary (e.g. the outlet that broke the news first, then those that expanded or confirmed it). As for why you rarely see conservative-leaning sites cited by WTFJHT: most don’t actually break news. They typically offer commentary or “alternative facts” framing of stories originally reported elsewhere.
Is this written by an AI? No. All content is researched, written, and curated by Matt, an irl human working out of his basement in Seattle, WA. I don’t use AI to generate the blurbs. I may, however, use AI tools for tasks like organizing ideas, copy editing, and improving the writing for clarity in ways no different than using grammar and spell checkers. These tools help sharpen my writing, but the ideas, reporting, and approach are my own. Understanding complex political events and making meaningful connections requires a human approach grounded in journalistic ethics, curiosity, and accountability. And lastly, you’ll note that the typos are a dead giveaway that a human wrote it.
Site Features
What does the 📌 mean? Where possible, I like to “re-up” news from the past to contextulize 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.
Policies & Boundaries
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.
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 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.
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.
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