Welcome to Home of the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier. This week is the one year anniversary of Home of the Brave, so perhaps it's time for a brief review, a board meeting. If I could hand out donuts, I'd do it now. I started out a year ago without knowing what this show would be about, the theme that

would connect the stories together from one week to the next, or how it would make money.

I knew this would be seen as poor planning, perhaps inept.

My friends just hung their heads. But I also knew there were advantages in having a podcast

without a theme or a sponsor. Namely, I could do whatever

I wanted. I had complete freedom, which is scary, so I called the show Home of the Brave. I got lucky right off the bat when Ira Glass promoted

Home of the Brave on his show, This American Life. That made a huge difference because it gave me an instant audience. I thought I could use this

audience to sell advertising, but then people started sending me money, sometimes a lot of money, a hundred to two hundred dollars from all around the world, but usually more like ten to twenty-five dollars.

They did it because I asked for donations, but also because they wanted me to keep going.

They wrote me emails and a lot of them said the same thing.

Don't stop.

So in a year I produced 32 news stories and posted another 10 from the archive.

And now Home of the Brave is entirely funded by listener contributions.

In one year I received just over $61,000 from 1700 individual donations, which is amazing to me and my friends are shocked.

This funding enabled me to travel to Nepal, across Europe, drive back and forth across the United States, talking to people I felt were being ignored by the corporate media, like the people who were actually there when

the boat sank or the church burned down or the entire town collapsed in an earthquake.

I let them talk at length in paragraphs and short stories instead of

sound bites and I think sometimes these stories scoop the corporate media. They were better

stories than those produced by multi-million dollar operations.

This feels good.

It feels like victory.

And I hope some of you feel it as well because your donations made it possible.

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