David Sirota's Master Plan Wins National Podcast Award

David Sirota, the Denver-based commentator, journalist and former Bernie Sanders speechwriter and senior advisor, launched his subscriber-supported outlet The Lever as a newsletter called The Daily Poster back in 2020. In 2022, it evolved into a fledgling investigative reporting team with a website focused on government accountability.

With a couple of former Westword staffers onboard, including managing editor Joel Warner and lead producer Jared Macang Maher (Sirota also wrote several stories for Westword a half-dozen years ago), The Lever made waves late last summer, just prior to the presidential election, with the release of its corruption-focused podcast Master Plan.

Master Plan focuses on a memo written by Lewis J. Powell shortly before his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971, and how subsequent strategies enacted by the far right that hewed to Powell's tactics brought about the modern-day implementation of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. The podcast shows how Powell's vision of conservative think tanks and policy advocacy institutes, advancing conservative thought on campuses, influencing the media to turn to the right, and single-mindedly focusing on remaking the judiciary came to fruition.

The Master Plan podcast is a superbly produced audio documentary tracing the cascading effects of what became known as the Powell Memorandum, and it was a boon for The Lever's subscriber base and ability to forge onward.

"[The podcast] definitely coincided with a major subscriber build for us," Sirota says. Two further seasons of Master Plan are currently in the works, and both follow the same formula. "There's problems in the present, and here's the story of how those problems were not inevitable," he explains. "They were not a force of nature. They were essentially preceded by a deliberate set of master plans,"

On May 26, the National Press Club announced Master Plan as the winner of the 2025 National Press Club Award, as well as the recipient of the gold medal for Best Investigative Journalism Podcast from the New York Festivals Radio Awards.

As the team at The Lever revels in this achievement, it's also planning to double-down on the story of the Powell Memorandum, with an announcement that it will soon release a self-published book based on the podcast, authored by Sirota and Maher.

"We debated going through a publisher," Sirota says, "but everything we've ended up doing, we ended up just DIYing it ourselves, and that's really worked for us.

The success of Master Plan was a surprise, but gratifying, Sirota says: "We're going to do a series on campaign finance — that sounds like a snooze. I think [its success] is a reminder that a lot of these issues seem wonky and boring, but there's a hunger for them if the storytelling is done in the right way."