EP is a reader-supported newsletter, sustained by subscriptions to its Bulldog edition. What you see here is its most recent Final.

In newspaper parlance, a Bulldog is an early edition. Here it means an email version of EP that is transmitted to subscribers at midnight Saturday EST. About eighteen hours later, the Final edition appears on the Web, often with small improvements, where it (and its archive) are available to readers around the world for free.

The idea is that everybody who is interested in the production and distribution of economics ideas (and their consequences — that’s where politics comes in) should have access to the Website, especially those who are far removed from economics’ major research centers.  The expectation is that a relative handful of core supporters will pay for all the rest—a little like public radio in the United States.

A $50 annual subscription to the  Bulldog brings occasional reports to readers about goings-on behind the scenes; offers the opportunity to correct typos and suggest corrections to the Final edition; and includes threads associated with each new column to which only subscribers may contribute and/or read.

Gift subscriptions are encouraged. Family discounts are available. The subscriber list is entirely confidential.

EP is somewhat off its former peaks, when it was read regularly by some 20,000 persons in more than 100 countries, but it still gets around, and its supporters include a wide range of interesting people.  It doesn’t take many more than 300 subscriptions to keep it going. Newspapers and magazines, two-sided markets traditionally supported mainly by advertisers, have been greatly disrupted by rapid technological change. As a result, far too little independent scrutiny of economics takes place.

Can newsletters like this one can help fill the gap? Even exert a salutary influence on traditional media? Of course they can. Whether or not they do depends on you.