# Popular Information ***Popular Information*** is an accountability-journalism newsletter founded in **2018** by [[Judd Legum]] and published on **[[Substack]]**, where it was one of the platform's early political successes. Legum had spent the previous decade running **ThinkProgress**, the media arm of the [[Center for American Progress]], which he founded and edited before leaving to start the newsletter; earlier he was research director for [[Hillary Clinton]]'s 2008 presidential campaign, having been hired into CAP at its founding by [[John Podesta]]. The newsletter began behind a paywall and dropped it in early 2020, so its reporting is now free to read. Its beat is **corporate and political accountability traced through documents** — campaign-finance filings, corporate donation records, school-board materials, advertiser lists — rather than access reporting. The recurring method is to take a company's or an official's public commitment and check it against the paper: who actually got the money, whether the pledge survived the news cycle, which donors sit behind a group's name. A twice-weekly spin-off, *Musk Watch*, covers [[Elon Musk]] specifically, with Legum describing plans for a broader watch on comparably situated billionaires. ## Why this matters for the KB Popular Information is one of this vault's most frequently cited **primary-adjacent** sources on [[Dark Money]] and political-spending structure: it reads the filings, which means its claims are usually checkable against the same records rather than against an anonymous official. Its reporting underpins vault coverage of PAC and donor-vehicle networks, voter-registration and election-administration groups, and the post–January 6 corporate-donation reversals it tracked company by company. Its documented wins are the argument for the method: pandemic-era reporting on Darden Restaurants preceded paid sick leave for roughly 175,000 restaurant workers, and its January 6 donation tracking prompted dozens of corporations to reconsider or suspend giving to election deniers. The newsletter writes from an openly liberal standpoint, which is a framing caveat rather than a sourcing one — the underlying records it cites are the thing to follow. ## See Also - [[Judd Legum]] — founder and principal writer - [[Substack]] — the platform it helped establish as a home for political reporting - [[Center for American Progress]] — parent of ThinkProgress, which Legum founded and edited before this - [[Dark Money]] — the beat the newsletter is most cited for in this vault - [[The Bulwark]] — the other subscription-newsletter outlet this vault leans on for original political reporting