As you may have seen — or heard in one of my several announcements — my newsletter, the Tuesday, is no longer available to read for free: It is available to NRPlus subscribers. You can become one of those by signing up here. That was always my intention and my preference from the beginning. There are a couple of reasons for that, and I would like to share these. We have always thought of National Review as a collaborative effort between the magazine and its supporters, and collaboration requires transparency and open communication.

Some tens of thousands of you have signed up for the newsletter, for which I am grateful. (I still have a long ways to go before I catch up with Geraghty.) It has become, as was intended, a little community of shared interests, and it is one I enjoy. Most of the Tuesday regulars already are NRPlus subscribers (and many of those who weren’t have signed up in the past few weeks), and, from a purely selfish point of view, I prefer the kind of readership you get when there is a paid subscription to the one you get when you’re giving it away for free. I believe it was Pope Benedict who said that a more urgent insistence upon basic teachings might result in “fewer, but better” Catholics. (I have quoted that line for a long time, but only recently learned it was a paraphrase of Lenin.) I feel that way about many things. We could get a larger audience by giving away our work, but I do not think that actually serves the long-term interests of National Review as an institution.

Thanks to the excellent work and leadership in our organization, I do not have to think very much about the business side of things. But I have long believed that our future lies in a subscriber-based revenue model rather than an advertising-driven one, and that has been National Review’s corporate position for some time now. Contrary to what many people seem to think, there is not some secretive conservative billionaire behind National Review, and, like most opinion journals — Left and Right — we do not get the sort of corporate advertising that would be necessary to sustain a venture such as this one, though there are some companies that are intelligent enough to do themselves the favor of advertising to National Review’s readers.

I got into the newspaper business at the tail end of the golden age of daily print journalism, back when local papers still enjoyed reliable 20-percent profit margins because grocery stores, car dealers, department stores, and businesses seeking employees all relied on the local newspaper for advertisement. That model has changed radically. Some businesses have adapted intelligently, and some have left nothing behind but sad stories. Add to that the particular challenges of running a publication that is inherently controversial — whose mission is controversy — and it is a miracle that these exist at all.

For a magazine such as ours, there are basically two ways to go: One is commodity eyeball-farming, generating as much traffic through the website as possible in order to earn a fraction of a penny for each one through the familiar third-party, ad-serving model. The other way is to sell subscriptions, i.e., to ask National Review readers to fund National Review, which really is much more like our historical model going back to the 1950s. Digital subscriptions are, from a business point of view, especially attractive, because it costs a ton of money to print and deliver physical magazines. The print magazine isn’t going anywhere, thank goodness — I am a print dinosaur and love it when the magazine is delivered, especially when I have the cover story — and you can get your print+digital subscription here.

That is what is going to keep us free, independent, and in possession of the resources to do what we are here to do.

Rich Lowry likes to joke that National Review was founded to make a difference, not a profit, and that it has been excessively true to that mission. The fact is, there is a lot of work for conservative journalism to do, and if National Review’s revenue doubled or trebled tomorrow, we’d still be a money-losing enterprise — we would just do more. We are a pro-market, pro-capitalism, pro-profit organization, but National Review itself is not profit-oriented and never has been. Our goal is independence and sustainability.

So, that is how we do things, and that is where we are going. If you aren’t an NRPlus subscriber but like to read National Review, the subscriber experience is much more pleasant than the ad-oriented one. There’s a solid economic reason that the homepage of even a relatively big-money operation such as Slate looks like a forgotten MySpace page for the devil’s whorehouse — and the less I see of that, the happier I am. I assume that many of you will feel exactly the same way.

So, please do subscribe. It isn’t very expensive — you can take advantage of our 60-percent-off deal right now — and it supports work that isn’t being done by any other magazine and probably can’t be. Plus, you get my language nerdery and dachshund pictures. And you will miss Pancake.

My sincere thanks to our friends and supporters — everybody says, “We couldn’t do this without you,” but, in our case, that is literally true.

And, unlike Joe Biden, National Review editors know what literally means.