Three years ago today, The Capitolist officially launched, as the site “for people whose business is politics.” The vision of our Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Brian Burgess, was to combine original content with comprehensive news aggregation into a invaluable one-stop-shopping resource for following politics in the Sunshine State.

Along with this website, we launched an app, available for free in both Apple’s iTunes Store and Google Play, to provide quick and simple mobile access to all our content, the top Florida political morning newsletters, curated Twitter feeds, lobbyist registration information, and more.

Since our launch, we’ve built Twitter and Facebook audiences of almost 28,000 and growing. Our Facebook audience alone is now the third largest in the state among Florida-specific digital news sites, surpassed only by the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times (both of which are over a century older than we are, with significantly larger budgets and staff).

Our readers are in every corner of the state, with especially strong presences in Tallahassee, Orlando, Tampa, and Miami.

Our first year, we had about 73,000 unique visitors and about a quarter million page views. In 2018, that grew to over 1.8 million people who saw content from The Capitolist on their phone or computer more than 2.6 million times. And those numbers have continued to grow through 2019.

We’ve done it all with one small Tallahassee office, part-time staff mostly working remotely, plus the valuable insights from dozens of guest contributors from both sides of the partisan aisle who have shared their expertise and opinions on a wide variety of topics. (If you have an idea for a guest column, let us know!)

Thanks to Brian for having the vision to believe there was space for another Florida political website, all our writers, our advertisers and sponsors, and most of all, all our readers.

It’s been a great three years, and I’m proud to have my byline associated with the stellar team here at The Capitolist. We have some new and exciting things in the works for the 2020 election cycle, so stay tuned.

Follow Sarah Rumpf on Twitter: @rumpfshaker. 

Photo by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier via Flickr.