Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Josh Marshall, the founder of the liberal political news site Talking Points Memo (which turns 17 this year), isn’t shy about sharing numbers and publicly setting goals for the site. About a year ago, he told my colleague Ricardo Bilton that TPM had about 11,000 paying Prime subscribers, and that he hoped to be near 20,000 by the end of 2016. By the end of the year, TPM had 18,900 people paying $50 a year or $5 a month.
Marshall doesn’t want that incentive to be putting a large portion of the existing site behind a paywall. “This is not something we’ve considered and opted against. I’ve never considered it. And it won’t happen,” he wrote in a post on the site this month. Instead, he wrote about an idea that would give Prime subscribers an early peek at what its reporters are seeing and hearing:
One of things that has been central to TPM, through all its various permutations going on twenty years online has been breaking down the fourth wall of political journalism….A decade ago this approach made us almost unique in the space. That is much less the case now. But how we do it is still quite distinct and different in many ways. What I have been mulling is finding ways to add more of that, more of that explanation of mechanics of what’s happening and ability to see over the horizon and have that be where we focus on creating that extra layer of Prime only content. Let me give you just one example. I don’t know if we’re going to do this or not. It’s just the kind of thing I’ve been considering.
I have my hands in many different parts of this operation on the edit side and business side. So not infrequently I’ll come back from a meeting or finish up working on one thing and I’ll want to know the status of a specific story. And here I’m not talking about a discrete article or post but the story itself — James Comey’s firing, the new Supreme Court decisions, did KT McFarland ever really get fired or not, what goes into McConnell strong arming a Trumpcare bill before the July 4th recess. I need a quick operational take to get my bearings. So I’ll ask whichever one of our editors is working that story for a quick run-down. Usually what I’ll get is a handful of entirely unadorned sentences, with none of the lede and story framing of an article or a post. It’s just telling me here’s the latest, here’s what we think is about to happen and here’s what we’re most focused on finding out. That’s what I need to know to base decisions on, get my bearings, know what to expect over the next 72 hours.
I’d like to be able to share those updates with readers. Some of the information couldn’t be made public of course. There might be confidential or unverified information. But broadly speaking, most of those details are ones we could share with readers but don’t for a handful of logistical reasons, time constraint reasons, format reasons and simple habit. But I would like to — mostly because it’s a general guide star for me that things that help me understand the news in real time would be helpful to other avid political news consumers too.
I spoke with Marshall about adding this “explanation of mechanics,” the site’s plans to add investigative reporters (“dramatically more relevant now that we have President Trump, who obviously is a sort of a job-creation machine for investigative journalists”), and why he’s been adding so many drawings to his tweets. Our conversation, lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity, is below.
One of them is that our reason for existing is to publish news reporting to a large audience. We don’t want to paywall most of what we do. We also anticipate that even if our subscription efforts go as well as we want them to this year, we’re still going to have at least half of our revenues coming from advertising, so we don’t want to dramatically decrease pageviews, because that will affect advertising.
What we are looking for are things that are are only really going to be of interest to our core readership, people who are logical subscribers to TPM. Things that fall into that category, both that might not have a lot of relevance to our broader audience as opposed to our core audience, and things that the core audience is really going to be into. That is where we come up with giving people more detail, more transparency, more guidance in understanding the stories of the day and our reporting, as the the key thing we want to focus in on. One of the possibilities was what I discussed in that post: having short editor explainers of the status of a story at a given moment. It’s really kind of putting together those different imperatives and seeing what fits into that mix as the kind of things that make sense to be the added layer of value, the deeper insight into stories that are, you know, the biggest things that fit that are of the biggest value to our core readers and things that are likely to entice them to become paying members.
This builds on something that I think has always been very core to the site, which is sort of breaking down the journalistic fourth wall and narrating stories — giving readers insight into the process of reporting and things that, just because of format reasons, are hard to fit into sort of conventional genres of journalistic writing. In that sense, it’s very organic to what the site has always been about, going back almost two decades now.
And there's more pic.twitter.com/PrzBWBpYUh
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 27, 2017
All good, all good https://t.co/qr5a7b43OE pic.twitter.com/EIuffwRp5N
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 23, 2017
I do appreciate it. pic.twitter.com/fOdhj1YJlD
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 16, 2017
In terms of other sites, even though The New York Times and The Washington Post are obviously just altogether different operations than us, in scale and a million other ways, they have moved to what I would call porous paywalls and that’s something that I’ve watched to see how it’s evolved.
I guess in general, for better or worse, I don’t think most of the changes that we’ve made over the last three or four years have been tied to watching other sites. It was more things kind of internal to us or just watching the industry in general — and seeing how other publications have failed or had problems, and thinking about why that was the case and what that says about the trajectory of the industry.
I’ve wanted to make a more determined and concentrated investment in investigative journalism. What we mean by investigative journalism will be different from what a lot of other places mean, but coming out of last year, with what we’ve been doing with subscriptions and all of that kind of business model work has put us in a position to do this.
We already had something like this in mind before Trump was elected, before I really thought he would be elected, so we have kind of fine-tuned it, given the times we’re living in. But it was something that, in a broad sense, we already had in mind coming into 2017. It’s the product of readers demonstrating their confidence in us by subscribing, and in that way, being a big part of allowing us to keep the site healthy and growing — albeit when we say growing we’re talking about hiring three reporters, not the way that startups grow or something. That’s why it is, it really grows out of the evolution of the business, our longstanding interest in and commitment to original reporting and investigative journalism, and having those two things come together over the last year or so. I think, and hope, it’s dramatically more relevant now that we have President Trump, who obviously is a sort of a job creation machine for investigative journalists.
We’ve learned a lot over the last few years about how to construct a business model that allows a substantial but still relatively small news organization to thrive. It’s taken a lot of trial and error and experimentation, but we’ve been, it sounds corny to say, but we’ve been incredibly appreciative and gratified that we have an audience of committed readers who have stepped up and made all of this possible. It gives us all warm fuzzy feelings. We’re still the same smallish site, but we see what is happening in other parts of the industry, and we are very lucky to have the audience that we have.
