A year ago, a spirited and public-records-powered newsletter needed a mascot. Sleuthy the Seal — born of a “fortuitous misunderstanding” — was created. Journalist and newsletter founder David Covucci promised his wife he’d get the plucky mascot tattooed if he could hit 500 subscribers with the solo venture. The football helmet-wearing seal quickly had a permanent place on his forearm.
After being laid off in May 2025 from The Daily Dot, along with much of the news staff, Covucci decided to unleash his prodigious public records skills on the multi-billion-dollar world of college football. Many of the top programs, after all, are housed at public institutions subject to the Freedom of Information Act. His newsletter, FOIAball, has garnered roughly 7,500 subscribers, including 420 paid subscribers, in its first year. Subscriptions are $70/year or $7/month.
FOIAball has a rollicking, confiding, they-don’t-want-you-to-know energy — whether its subject is federal surveillance at college football games or the Spotify playlist Dianna Russini (allegedly) made for Mike Vrabel or how one university used a friendly charity to get tax-free NIL money or Pitbull failing to deliver a fight song commissioned by Florida International University.
Covucci got his start “in the blogging days” writing five or six times a day for the men’s humor site BroBible, where he also FOIAed the contents of Osama Bin Laden’s porn stash. His writing voice, as he puts it, remains “a little trolly” and “a bit mischievous.”
“This stuff is interesting and fun. You’re talking about really rich people. You’re talking about exciting football teams. You’re talking about big institutions and government and surveillance and all sorts of silly things,” Covucci said. “I get why some larger institutions want to be buttoned up, but I wish there could be more energy in media. This stuff is absurd. It would be silly for me to not cover it in that way.”
“I don’t want to say it’s, like, a totally new style of writing, but I haven’t seen too many people blending investigative reporting and personal essays,” he added.
Some of the sillier stuff includes which college team spent the most on fireworks in 2025, urinal algorithms, and whether Brutus, Goldy, Sparty, or The Duck (all mascots) made the most in booking fees. Covucci prides himself on each issue containing original reporting.
For now, though FOIAball uses “we” on its about page, it’s the royal we. FOIAball remains a one-man newsroom. More subscribers could mean hiring. With extra hands, Covucci said, he’d like to cover college basketball and Olympic sports. But making a living is the goal for now. Covucci aims to double his current number of paid subscribers in the next year.
Building FOIAball as a business feels like running “both a sales operation and a nonprofit” at the same time, Covucci said. He described a frustrating and fundamental tension with paywalls: He needs readers to pony up because they’ve fallen in love with FOIAball, but how will they if all the best content goes behind a paywall? Although the number of subscribers has steadily risen, Covucci hasn’t found a silver bullet for getting people to open their wallets. Right now, he mixes hard paywalls with softer “institutional support” asks.
“So much of it is trial and error,” Covucci conceded.
While hard paywalls can work when a story goes viral (see: this Aaron Rodgers post on X), subscriptions from a single big story tend to be “soft” and “drop off,” Covucci said.
Instead, he’s found direct, transparent appeals to readers convert better than hard paywalls on their own. One example from February, when he had 165 paid subscribers:
Normally, I show up in your inbox and tell you something you don’t know. That’s what great journalism is. Today, I’m doing the opposite. I’m going to tell you something you already know.
Paywalls don’t really work.
Covucci compared two scoops from the previous week and how they affected his subscription numbers. “Just one person” subscribed to read a paywalled report, while three paid on a free-to-read scoop. He leveled with his readers:
Building a paid subscriber base is a grind. I don’t mean that it is a drag or a pain. Just that it is a long process over time. There is no hack. I can’t publish one huge scoop that makes 200 people give me money. A good story earns two; the next story doesn’t. The scoop after that maybe gets one. The next zero. […]
What makes people really pay isn’t any one piece. It’s them falling in love with what they are reading. Believing in the mission. Caring about the coverage. Appreciating the voice and style and breadth. They want to ensure the publication stays afloat. Maybe even thrive.
I sincerely hope those thoughts have crossed your mind.
The email (which also included a discount on subscriptions) was a success. Generally, Covucci said, a hard paywall has been less effective than catching a nonpaying reader “at the right point,” after they’ve been reading for a while, and making a direct, personal ask to support the thing they already like. More recently he’s also been experimenting with “catchy, clicky text” in front of the paywall instead of paywalling the entire post. In both cases, beating the bystander effect is key.
“When readers see paywalls, I think they assume, ‘Oh yeah, plenty of people click through that, so I don’t have to,’” Covucci said. He’s done the same. “I think we’re all guilty of [thinking], ‘Someone else will do this.’ And not just in supporting media, but in lots of things.”
Later this month, Covucci will be announced as part of the next class of the Beehiiv Media Collective. Being in the collective means he won’t have to pay the roughly $120/month to the platform and will get other perks, including legal help and mentorship.
Covucci very diplomatically praised all FOIA officers when asked about securing the public records that serve as the backbone of his reporting. Still, some records have proven easier to acquire than others. Michigan State? Prompt and professional with requests. Less than 100 miles away at Michigan? Covucci said he has requests that are well over a year old still waiting to be fulfilled. Covucci said universities in Texas, Florida, and South Carolina are among the best at fulfilling requests as required by the law.
“I have found that southern conservative states are actually better at public records than northern liberal states,” Covucci said. “My theory is whereas liberal-leaning states think FOIA is great in practice, they sort of love the government and don’t want people to be bashing it, whereas conservative states are like ‘Here, take these government papers. We hate this thing. It’s probably wasting our money.'”
A decade ago, Georgia changed its public records procedure after the University of Georgia’s head football coach visited legislators and answered questions about the competitive disadvantages public records could pose. (Colleges in the state can now wait 90 days to respond to public records requests related to athletics.)
“I try to be understanding because it is a funky situation where these big, practically professional sports teams have just been slapped to the side of public institutions,” Covucci said. “I understand that it’s a bizarre situation, which is why I do it. I find the whole thing very fascinating.”
