American Conversations: Josh Marshall & Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo

0:02 Hey everybody from Nashville, Tennessee and Halifax, Nova Scotia.

0:05 I don't think I've seen you here before, Suzanne.

0:08 Georgia.

0:09 Uh Morrison, Colorado, home of Red Rocks.

0:12 Huh.

0:13 Uh Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

0:16 Um Kirkland, Washington.

0:19 Metro Detroit, Romeo, Michigan.

0:22 Um it looks like I'm Vienna, Austria.

0:25 Baltimore, Maryland, Manchester, New Hampshire.

0:28 Um, Los Angeles.

0:30 I'm Oh, here we go.

0:31 And Kristen is here from Facebook.

0:33 I was starting to worry it couldn't be here because I'm

0:35 getting a message that not all comments are going to all destinations.

0:40 And I don't know what that's about, but I'm not going to figure it out now.

0:42 Thank you for being here.

0:44 I'm thrilled today to be here with the extraordinary opportunity

0:48 to talk to Josh Marshall and Kate Ria of Talking Points Memo.

0:52 And I'm especially excited about this uh

0:54 because they are having a huge membership drive.

0:57 But I jumped in on not only helping

0:59 with that but also introducing uh them to people

1:03 because I have been reading Josh Marshall's talking points

1:07 memo since he began publishing it 25 years ago.

1:10 He is the reason I got involved in digital media.

1:15 Uh we have never actually met before and I read

1:18 Kate Ria every day because she is all over American politics.

1:22 So, the opportunity to talk to the two of them about where the um

1:28 the digital media has been and where it's

1:30 going was absolutely too good to pass up.

1:33 So, thank you very much both of you for being here.

1:37 Thanks for having us.

1:39 So, so let's start Josh with why you started

1:43 talking points memo which at the time was so revolutionary.

1:49 I I remember the person who told me about it

1:51 and told me to start reading and I remember being like,

1:54 "Whoa, I had no idea that somebody could

1:57 do this." And you actually came from academia, right?

2:01 Yeah.

2:01 Well, I spent I spent basically my 20s uh in in graduate

2:05 school getting a history doctorate and um something as as as you know,

2:10 people go through a lot of life transformations uh in graduate school.

2:14 And I think about halfway through the time that on paper or maybe earlier

2:19 on paper that I was in graduate school I I realized that being an academic

2:23 was not a fit for me even though I remained very interested

2:26 in in the in the subject matter I was I was studying and um I decided that I

2:32 wanted to you know get into the kind of work that I ended up

2:36 doing uh you know a mix of reporting and and and and commentary and um

2:42 so I Uh my my first job in journalism was working for a place called

2:48 the American Prospect which I did up

2:50 in it was then based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

2:53 Um that took me down to Washington DC where I opened up a bureau for them.

2:57 And uh I started uh TPM kind of at the very

3:02 at the at the tail end of the time I was doing that.

3:06 And I started it because um it's really a couple reasons.

3:10 one is that I uh trying to support myself in graduate school,

3:14 I had done a lot of web design um as as a as a way to make

3:17 extra money and so I knew the mechanics of of websites and how to do that.

3:23 And today obviously there are all these services and platforms where

3:26 you can you know spin something up out of the blue.

3:28 It was it was that was I had sort of like uh uh some

3:33 special access to that because I had some of the technical skills at the time.

3:37 There was also um I wanted a way to write

3:40 that I did not feel I could write at other places.

3:44 Um and uh I saw a couple other people doing similar things.

3:49 I really liked it and uh I started it because I wanted I wanted a venue

3:55 where I could write the way that I wanted to write in exactly that way.

3:59 And when I started it, I realized I enjoyed it even more than I thought.

4:04 Um, and that's why that's really why I I started it.

4:08 I had I had a c I had a particular way I wanted to do journalism.

4:12 Um, didn't feel like I could do it anywhere else.

4:15 And that was the origin of TPM.

4:17 Can you explain to us what that looks like,

4:20 that different way of doing journalism?

4:23 Well, um I I think part of it is I wanted to not

4:28 be bound by a lot of the conventions of political, you know,

4:34 of polit of of journalism writing even as they applied

4:37 at the time to what we then called sort of like,

4:39 you know, small political magazine uh uh journalism.

4:43 I wanted to write in a in a freer style

4:46 uh that is that is um uh much less formal.

4:51 Um and I wanted to be I wanted to be very direct.

4:55 I think at the time there there wasn't really or at least I

4:58 was not aware of a a kind of political journalism that spoke directly

5:04 to you in ordinary language and didn't feel the need to uh genulect

5:11 or name check these these kind

5:14 of concepts that governed how political journalism functioned.

5:19 I wanted to speak directly to it.

5:21 Um and the other thing was I I wanted this is something

5:27 we still talk about at TPM being genre agnostic or format agnostic.

5:32 I wanted to write about particular issues without

5:36 being bound to you know the magazine journalism

5:40 form or the uh you know that kind

5:43 of classic inverse pyramid uh daily newspaper article.

5:47 Some things there are some points you want

5:49 to make that you only need one sentence to make

5:51 them and some you can do in a paragraph

5:54 and others you have to sort of digress into history.

5:58 I wanted to be able to do all of those things um and match

6:03 the the the the way I would approach writing

6:05 something to the actual thing I was writing about.

6:08 So I think I I guess probably the best way to put

6:11 it is is that in my in my then relatively limited

6:14 experience in journalism about three years as a working journalist there I

6:18 felt there was all these kind of walls I had bumped up

6:20 against and this was a way for me to operate without

6:23 any walls um and uh be much more frank about politics than

6:31 I felt that I could be much more direct much more frank

6:35 um and also uh probably interjecting sort of more of my personality.

6:41 Um, you know, either a good thing or a bad thing depending on one's taste.

6:46 But, um, I wanted to write about politics in a way that was, um,

6:53 exciting and fun in a way that is

6:56 completely consistent with the subject matter being very important.

7:00 I didn't want it to be a kind of an eat your vegetables kind of enterprise.

7:04 I wanted it to be um I wanted to have some of that uh you know sort

7:12 of joy in the civic process that I think

7:14 is at the heart of what American democracy is about.

7:17 Um, so those are the reasons that I that I started TPM.

7:22 And and I would add to that, one of the things that jumped out to me early

7:25 on was the degree to which the comments

7:28 on your articles enabled you in many ways to crowdsource stories.

7:32 And that really seemed to me to help you get onto

7:35 the map in a big way with the crisis in the George W.

7:38 Bush administration over the firing of the US attorneys.

7:42 That was a that was a major story that you broke because people were like,

7:46 "Hey, wait, we lost a US attorney, too." Yep.

7:49 Yep.

7:50 And and there were uh that goes back to the very beginning of the site.

7:53 And that's that's one thing that that that was something I did

7:56 not know would be the case at all when I started it.

8:00 Um but from the very first days of starting it um you know I had

8:05 an email address there and I had um I had either then or not long after

8:11 that I would write I for strange set of reasons I used to write uh opinion

8:16 articles for the New York Post um and I would write stuff for the New Yorker.

8:21 So I wrote in like you know publications that had had real reach and you'd

8:26 write one of write in one of those places and maybe you'd get like a letter

8:30 or two right and here I was writing what uh then was a tiny tiny tiny

8:37 readership in dozens of people and I would

8:40 write something and I would immediately get feedback.

8:43 Um, and some of my uh personality, the mix of uh, I don't know, ego and ADHD.

8:53 I mean, I liked that feedback, right?

8:55 But I also I also discovered very quickly I was getting all sorts of tips

9:01 and and often things that aren't aren't tips

9:04 in terms of like you know kind of secrets but I would hear from people who who

9:08 had some professional experience in in in the subject

9:12 that I was writing about and I would

9:15 I would be getting new information from them.

9:18 uh and and sometimes it would be tips or often

9:20 it would be tips just in the form of an article,

9:24 a news article that had maybe appeared in some local

9:27 paper in some you know some place in the country

9:31 and so from the very beginning it was I I

9:34 was getting this flood of useful information and that is

9:40 for for those who are familiar with the site

9:42 this is why there are still no comments we we don't

9:45 have comments architecture on the editor tors blog and the reason

9:48 for that is that I got addicted very early

9:51 to the responses by email and responses by email are

9:55 different from what you get in comments and again the reason

9:57 there were no comments in the first place is

9:58 that I was literally handcoding each post in HTML there was

10:02 no there was no platform that could handle comments um

10:06 so that that crowdsourcing what what what eventually came to be

10:12 called crowdsourcing um was huge and I and and I

10:17 just I I felt that I had this, you know,

10:20 kind of privileged access to all sorts of information

10:24 in real time that allowed me to move much more quickly

10:30 than than a lot of journalistic peers because I had

10:34 I had access to expertise that they that they didn't have.

10:37 And the thing that I realized is that the sort

10:41 of fringe benefit to writing a lot and writing

10:45 quickly and writing in a very conversational style

10:48 and with that email right there very public is that people

10:53 felt there was no people there people didn't feel

10:58 there was any obstacle to just reaching out to me

11:01 and telling and telling me something and obviously all

11:04 the other you know the legacy news media since then has,

11:09 you know, caught on to this.

11:10 So people know much more about contact,

11:12 whether it's through Twitter or Blue Sky or email or whatever.

11:15 That wasn't the case.

11:16 Then there was the sense of like how, you know,

11:18 how how am I going to contact a reporter

11:20 at the New York Times or the Washington Post.

11:23 So a lot of that um intimacy and directness that now seems um

11:30 to be just natural and automatic even

11:33 with legacy publications did not exist then.

11:36 Um, and I kind of happened into it.

11:38 I mean, other things about the the the the writing

11:42 style and the subject I was interested, I brought that to it.

11:45 But the the intensive connection with readers

11:50 and the way that that became a source of information,

11:54 that was a surprise to me basically from day one.

11:57 And that has continued to be something that's core

12:00 to the editorial process um at TPM even even as a lot of the rest of the media

12:07 has sort of you know caught on to these things.

12:08 I mean that's that's been a lot of the history of the uh 25 years

12:12 of of of the site that we had a lot of things that were very innovative

12:16 at the very beginning but people catch

12:18 on to your innovations right with you know

12:21 we treat it as like normal now that like the times the post have live blogs.

12:25 Well, of course they do.

12:26 Why wouldn't they?

12:27 Well, they didn't then, right?

12:29 And so that's another reason why you always have

12:31 to be um you have to keep in, you know,

12:34 you have to keep coming up with new things to uh to maintain your edge.

12:39 Well, so hang on to that thought because I want

12:41 to end up talking about the the world of the modern media.

12:45 But Kate, I really want to turn to you because you

12:47 are one of the political journalists that I start my day with.

12:52 I can't I can't start the day without reading you.

12:55 If your name is on something, I drop everything and read it.

12:58 And you could have gone anywhere or done anything.

13:01 How are you thinking about talking points memo or TPM as you call it?

13:06 And and why there?

13:09 So, I think the biggest thing for me kind of loops

13:13 into what Josh was talking about earlier with um the frankness

13:18 and less um being kind of tethered to political convention because

13:23 that's something that even by the time I joined TPM, which was,

13:27 you know, 2017, was still just so thin on the ground

13:31 and kind of enabled us to be early on things

13:35 that have become the primary themes of American political life and I

13:40 think in particular like the extremism of the Republican party, right?

13:44 Like we were covering that a long time ago

13:47 which kind of well positioned us for the Trump era,

13:50 but the reason we were able to cover that was because

13:53 you didn't have to do the kind of both sides thing, right?

13:57 We could talk more about the advantages

14:00 for the Republican party that are baked into the system

14:02 that everyone else kind of just treats

14:05 as the foundation to every story, just like a given.

14:08 and we could kind of dissect that more.

14:11 Um, and for instance, in the past two weeks, you know, I've covered Cole.

14:16 Um, we've been covering a lot of the the fallout, the redistricting arms race.

14:22 And I've been covering redistricting since I start first started at TPM

14:25 when it was not really something that other outlets were talking about.

14:29 you would have like kind of specialized uh you

14:32 know voting rights slanted places that were talking about it,

14:35 but it was kind of a little boring,

14:38 a little weedsy, a little hard to wrap your arms around.

14:41 I remember when I first started writing about it,

14:43 I would take pains to get the word redistricting

14:46 out of the headline because it's like such a turnoff.

14:49 Um but because we were able to do that and because of our small size where

14:55 it really kind of um incentivizes you to go

14:59 deep on specific things because we simply can't, you know, go general.

15:04 Um there are just too few of us.

15:06 It really just kind of steeps you um in these important topics.

15:10 And as we've seen, you know, in the second Trump administration,

15:14 a lot of what I would say is the lifeblood of TPM has become,

15:20 you know, the leading issues in in our democracy.

15:23 It is interesting the degree to which what seemed

15:26 to be specialized topics that I would consider the bed

15:30 the bedrock of democracy that people were playing in but not

15:34 people weren't paying much attention are suddenly now headline news.

15:37 I will point out you you might think I don't actually mean it when

15:40 I say I read everything that you write as quickly as it comes out,

15:43 but I've already read your piece that came out at 11:39

15:46 today on the uh what the Democrats in Virginia are doing.

15:51 And it's a it's a quite thorough piece uh with Kaia Himlman about

15:56 what the the Democrats can do in Virginia and what that looks like.

16:00 and I wonder if you could tell people a little

16:03 bit about your process for researching some of this material.

16:09 So, with redistricting in particular, um you know,

16:12 it's so kind of fanned out across the South right now,

16:16 you know, so um there's a lot of communication going

16:19 on with people who I've talked to for previous stories.

16:22 Um, you know, I've done a lot of VRA work before, so I'm, you know,

16:27 in touch with kind of the the main experts on that, which is nice because,

16:31 as Josh was talking about, it's the new version of, you know,

16:34 people are sending me things like, "Did you see this?

16:36 I just read this this morning.

16:37 Uh, this guy is helpful." Everything like that.

16:41 Um, and because we're able to kind of focus in on these specific topics,

16:48 like my obsession right now is the only way to like salvage democracy is,

16:55 you know, if Democrats get a trifecta in 28,

16:58 they're going to have to do, you know, X, Y, and Z.

17:00 And is this Democratic party going to be willing

17:04 to do that if they are given the chance?

17:06 That is like my my driving interest.

17:09 So in the redistricting battles, you have the immediate effect on 26, right?

17:14 But and of course the the historical, you know,

17:17 atrocities of silencing black voters in the south,

17:21 but then the zoomed out version of that is

17:24 how are Democrats going to respond to this?

17:27 And are we going to see any inkling of the fight,

17:30 the the willingness to kind of withstand the backlash that they'll

17:34 need to have um and develop that muscle memory for 28?

17:38 So, it's I' always kind of putting it into these bigger frames.

17:46 Um, and when you sit down to write, what does that actually look like?

17:52 Um, so different formats.

17:54 Right now we're doing the live blog a lot because there are these incremental

17:59 developments happening in all the different

18:01 states and it's a really convenient place

18:03 to kind of say you know South Carolina is is advancing its plan

18:07 to delay the primaries which would not

18:09 necessarily warrant you know a full standalone post.

18:13 Um, but with something uh, you know, more intensive,

18:16 it's I start with the interviews, you know, talk to a whole bunch of people.

18:21 After that, I kind of organize all the quotes, make the outline,

18:25 determine if the story is still headed in the direction

18:28 that I thought it was going to initially, which is not always the case, right?

18:31 Sometimes you kind of find something more interesting while you're going.

18:35 um you know and then the just the the writing

18:38 component but I'm very um kind of backheavy in my writing.

18:43 I do a ton of reading, a ton of research and uh a ton of talking

18:47 to people before I kind of set pen to paper.

18:51 Uh it shows.

18:53 So you two have outlined, I think,

18:57 some really important things here, both uh Josh from the beginning,

19:01 this immediacy of media right through to Kate

19:05 talking about the instantaneous feedback and the attempt

19:08 to keep a live blog going as part of the attempt to reclaim American democracy.

19:13 And one of the reasons that I wanted to talk

19:15 to you was because um it seems to me

19:20 that looking at it as a historian that we are

19:23 in a moment that looks very much like the 1850s

19:26 when we got the rise of a new independent

19:28 media that was no longer beholden to the elite slave

19:31 owners and so as a result had a much

19:34 more immediate relationship with those Americans trying to protect democracy.

19:37 things like the New York Times for example or the Chicago Tribune

19:41 or like the 1890s and perhaps even more like that where uh

19:45 in that period there was the rise of all these new forms

19:49 of communication through these really ephemeral

19:51 newspapers for example most of which don't

19:54 exist any longer but also through the muckraking journalists who or so

19:58 they were called by Teddy Roosevelt who did deep dives on corruption

20:03 in the country showing how the sort of general idea of corruption

20:07 actually affected everyday lives and how

20:10 ordinary Americans could push back on that.

20:12 And I'm fascinated by the fact so few people seem to be talking about

20:16 that when they look at the fall of legacy media as we're seeing around us.

20:22 They're really not saying anything about

20:24 the contemporaneous rise of independent media.

20:28 And I would love to hear what you

20:29 two think about this media moment we're in, what

20:33 that might look like for the future

20:36 and what ordinary people can do to support that.

20:41 Let me just uh I want to hear what Kate says,

20:43 but let me just say a couple things about the the business side of it.

20:45 Um, you know, it it is when when we see just all

20:50 the journalists that have been laid off over the last uh, you know,

20:53 decade and a half or in in other other contexts going back uh, uh,

20:58 20, 30 years when we see that, we see uh, publications going out of business.

21:03 U, uh, we see just, you know, ju just recently them, you know,

21:06 being bought up by Bill, there's a lot of bad things happening.

21:08 So, so it's it's it makes sense to me that we're seeing that, but you're right.

21:12 There is this kind of um there is this uh

21:17 e fllororesence of independent media and independent media has

21:22 become the the fact of independent media has become

21:26 a lot more important just in the last 18 months.

21:28 You know we have always in terms

21:30 of our marketing have always emphasized that we're independent.

21:34 There's not some big corporation in the distance that, you know, that owns us,

21:37 that tells, you know, that that, uh, tells us what to do,

21:41 uh, could just lose interest and shut us down, like,

21:44 you know, for reasons that have nothing nothing to do with us.

21:48 But in a lot of ways it was it was uh it wasn't nearly as important as what we

21:53 have seen in the last two years because now we

21:56 see that if you are if you are not independent,

22:00 if you're owned by uh larger players in the economy,

22:04 a renegade president can basically snuff you out, right?

22:08 because like any big corporation has so many um points of vulnerability

22:14 with an unrestrained federal government that any

22:17 news organization they own is not independent.

22:19 The other part of this is is that um uh you know all

22:23 the all the journalistic carnage that happened uh uh over the last uh 15 years,

22:30 it created an opening for subscriberdriven publications

22:36 and that is so critical um for for independent media.

22:43 You know, it's part of the it's part of the arc of our story.

22:46 Just just really briefly,

22:47 for the first for the first 15 years or so of TPM's existence, it was well,

22:54 it it it was either had no business model in the first year or two,

22:57 but then had an advertising business model.

22:59 Um, and that was that was great

23:02 until the advertising industry uh the the digital

23:06 advertising collapsed and was basically taken

23:07 over by the big tech platforms, etc.

23:10 Um and one of the reasons that we still exist is because

23:14 we got started with a subscription model very early and that is

23:20 now we are almost entirely uh uh you know um more

23:25 than 90% of our of our uh revenue comes from reader subscriptions.

23:31 Um so that has that has made it possible

23:35 for us to continue and thrive all these years later.

23:39 But more importantly, we're not the only one doing that.

23:42 As you say, there is a whole um a whole upwelling

23:46 of independent news organizations that are

23:50 uh in in in various permutations subscription-driven.

23:54 So, this is there is a lot there's

23:56 a lot of rebirth happening today in in independent media.

23:59 sort of as you know not to get all uh you know Groshian

24:04 about this you know you have one order dying and another coming into existence

24:08 and a lot about our political moment

24:11 is having those two things being journalists being

24:15 citizens in a time when those two things are both happening at the same time.

24:18 I'm curious.

24:19 I want to throw this to Kate though because she's, you know,

24:22 has a has a more on the ground experience of this as a as a as a you know,

24:26 as a young journalist, right?

24:29 I mean, my first job was at a local

24:32 paper um on Long Island actually in the Hamptons.

24:36 Um and it's so kind of emblematic that paper no longer exists, you know.

24:40 I was there for one of the last years and it was it was like old school.

24:46 The journalists were old school, you know.

24:47 Um, it was a weekly print paper.

24:50 It we had the big printed out pages that you

24:54 would kind of go through with a red pen.

24:55 Everyone would circle any mistakes before it went to the printers.

24:58 You know, a a kind of journalism that feels so from a bygone age now.

25:03 Um, but you know, when I started at TPM, it was, you know,

25:10 you really want to go into journalism,

25:11 you know, that is that's a unstable career path.

25:14 You know, you're not going to make any money, you're going to get fired a lot.

25:17 It was just seen as a a really risky job that you could only do, you know,

25:22 in all honesty if you had financial backing from your parents or, you know,

25:26 enough of a safety net to kind of take the jump.

25:29 Um, and, you know, TPM also unionized the first week I was there,

25:34 which made it into an even more kind of uh, stable and and lucrative job.

25:40 But there's a piece of the the rise of independent

25:42 media that I'm kind of interested in what you

25:44 both think because I missed the you know I was

25:48 too young for the flurry of blogs in the 2010s

25:51 right when that became um you know such a big

25:56 kind of alternative media to the the big legacies

26:00 and um a way for people to kind of get

26:03 out of the political conventions and talk more honestly.

26:06 And you know when I meet readers who you know

26:09 started with TPM from the beginning I'm always like how did

26:12 you find it like how was it shared you know

26:16 and that's something that I still don't know what that's going

26:19 to look like with the rise of you know Substacks

26:21 and all these independent um forums like how are people going

26:26 to find it outside of the chunk of people that we

26:31 all know intimately who are already extremely high news consumers, right?

26:35 and are going to kind of seek out that information.

26:38 That's the piece that I still I'm interested to see,

26:41 you know, what that looks like in the new era.

26:43 What do you think, Josh?

26:46 Well, what I remember is that things were email-based, right?

26:50 People found out about things through email because that was kind of the only,

26:54 you know, real uh means of communication.

26:56 And uh you know very early on I mean

26:58 I remember you know when I would track when I

27:00 would when I would track traffic in the first weeks

27:04 that I was running TPM I had to make sure

27:06 that I didn't check the site too often because

27:09 I could I would I would you know I would

27:11 offset you know half the half the hits would be

27:14 mine right so I had to do all these things.

27:17 uh you know I I think um I there was tremendous word of mouth

27:23 which is to say by word of email and that's how people uh shared things.

27:27 It it is difficult to think back now that there literally was no social media.

27:32 None of these platforms existed.

27:34 Um it really even text didn't exist quite

27:36 in the same way because we didn't have smartphones, right?

27:39 Um uh so it was by email and but I

27:43 do think there is something that is similar to this moment.

27:47 Um I I started TPM in November 2000.

27:52 um there was a kind of a a a a welling up of them in the next year

27:56 and a half or two years uh 2001 2002 and I

28:00 think the the critical context of that is that you

28:06 would just had the 2000 the disputed 2000 election uh

28:11 with that George Bush at various levels did not win

28:14 and yet the upshot of that was a Bush presidency

28:18 and a Bush Congress both happening At the same time,

28:23 you quickly come into uh September 11th, the Iraq war,

28:29 these things happening with a uh a not surprising

28:35 though not understandable lot of rally around the flag,

28:38 a lot of news organizations not willing to be critical

28:42 of of the White House about of the political consensus in that context.

28:48 So you have all these things together, a sense that the media is kind of wired

28:55 for the for the political consensus of the moment.

28:58 But you had the beginnings of the internet or people

29:01 seeing that you could sort of just start things up, right?

29:04 Just just out of the blue.

29:06 And that really created this hunger among a lot of people

29:10 like I want to be hearing from someone who's not confined

29:15 in the legacy media context and I think that in a lot

29:20 of ways seems very similar to this moment especially what we saw

29:24 in 2025 which was you know what they were calling the vibe

29:28 shift how suddenly everything was Trump

29:32 and suddenly even even news organizations

29:35 corporations all these who had kind of if not been hostile

29:38 to Trump at least kept their distance like everything is now 100% Trump.

29:42 So it it it it helped create this um it helped create this hunger of you

29:51 want to hear from some people who are not going along with the moment, right?

29:55 And and that I think is really what powers

29:57 aside from the um uh you know the business models,

30:02 what is powering the hunger right now for a lot of independent publications.

30:07 And I would add to that that I think a lot

30:10 of us are creating what I would call a web.

30:13 And you think about that corporate media

30:15 that you're talking about or even the what

30:18 I would call the right-wing media since at least the Powell memo of 1971.

30:23 They created their own web.

30:24 And one of the things that I've really noticed in the last several months is

30:29 the degree to which the money is falling out of the bottom of those enterprises.

30:33 Not all of them.

30:34 there's a lot of uh you know a lot of billionaires who are buying up

30:37 major outlets but you're seeing real trouble

30:39 for like the Daily Wire for example and

30:42 now with the collapse of Victor Orban in Hungary

30:45 and the money that will come out of there and and even

30:48 Putin's troubles in Russia looking like they're going to cause

30:52 some problems for propaganda outlets in the United States.

30:55 you can sort of feel the momentum shifting the way it did in the late

30:59 1960s before the Powell memo to create

31:02 its own sort of right-wing uh uh ecosystem.

31:06 I sort of feel like we're seeing

31:07 the birth of a this progressive democratic ecosystem.

31:13 And again, it reminds me very much of the 1850s when you got

31:16 sort of the Republican literature coming

31:19 or the Republican media coming out of nowhere, you know, the new party.

31:23 And in the end of the day, um, Kate,

31:26 I think that it's funny to me that this is the new media,

31:30 but it's also really the old media.

31:32 We are so much like, you know,

31:35 Horus Gley sitting there at our dining room tables cranking stuff out.

31:40 And if you think of the way those things played out,

31:43 what we got was a lot of people who were there

31:46 for a little bit of time and made a huge difference,

31:48 but then decided that, you know,

31:50 they'd rather be tending their gardens or whatever and falling out of the system

31:55 and instead we got the establishment

31:57 of some big heavyhitting um big media outlets.

32:03 And I wonder if that's if we'll see the same thing that over

32:06 time we'll see the consolidation of a number of these voices into big,

32:10 you know, new papers or media outlets and a lot

32:14 of us will just fall by the wayside.

32:16 That's my guess anyway.

32:19 Yeah, that's really interesting to me.

32:20 Um I I guess it's all the foggess just around,

32:25 you know, the business model and the money like you say.

32:28 It's just that really the dying of the order

32:31 is really the way that conventional wisdom, you know, how everyone used to do

32:36 business and that's not really cutting it anymore.

32:38 And I think we've experimented with the benevolent billionaire theory enough

32:42 to know that that's not going to be stable underpinnings either.

32:46 So yeah, it'll be interesting to see what kind of grows out of this moment.

32:49 Well, and you can see Trump's um one of Trump's social

32:52 media outlets lost a a g gajillion dollars in the quarter.

32:57 that's the scientific term.

32:59 Um, but it doesn't matter because they're not there to make a profit.

33:02 And of course, the independent media is not there to make a profit either.

33:05 They're there to stay alive.

33:07 And that's um that's uh one of the things that I'm

33:11 I'm hoping that talking to you will encourage people to do

33:14 is to to keep TPM healthy and growing because it's been

33:19 such an important outlet uh for a quarter of a century now.

33:23 And I you know I c I certainly couldn't live without you all.

33:26 Um so what do you what would you encourage people to do

33:30 uh to to try and and support this independent media ecosystem?

33:35 Well the first thing and and incredibly uh generous of you

33:38 to say uh you know the first thing is to subscribe become

33:41 a member become a member of TPM as I said before

33:44 uh uh more than 90% of our revenue comes from our readers.

33:48 So, if you enjoy what you know, if you if you enjoy reading what we publish,

33:54 if you think it's important that we exist,

33:55 I really strongly recommend that you uh come

33:58 by our site and just sign up for a membership.

34:01 We're running a big discount now.

34:03 Uh there are a couple different tiers, you know,

34:05 depending on uh depending on your uh on your price point.

34:08 Um really, anything um it helps so much.

34:13 And I would also say uh we should all be in a mode

34:17 of subscribing to as many publications as our means allow us to do.

34:23 uh because as Heather said, you know, this is it it creates this economic web,

34:30 this environment where publications can come into existence

34:35 where people are used to the idea that yeah,

34:38 for for independent media to exist, I need to again in line with my means,

34:43 I need to find some places that I can become a member of and support that.

34:47 we all kind of we all need to do

34:49 this at at whatever level that um uh that we can.

34:53 So that is the big thing.

34:54 Subscribe to us first and after you subscribe

34:57 to TPM find some other places to uh uh subscribe to to it's it's uh it's

35:03 it's hugely important and it's hugely important for us.

35:07 It's hugely important for this um entire ecosystem.

35:11 And you know to to to your to your other question,

35:14 Heather, about how this how this plays out, right?

35:17 Is is there eventual consolidation?

35:19 Nothing lasts forever.

35:20 No one lasts forever.

35:22 Um and I think inevitably you're you have periods of consolidation

35:26 and you know periods of collapse and and and and rebirth.

35:30 The other thing I will say about TPM and how

35:33 we use uh our our readers uh uh membership fees

35:38 is that uh everybody wants to to uh you know

35:43 uh make a nice living to to stay in business.

35:46 What is different about independent media though

35:48 is yes we want to do those things

35:51 but if we just wanted to do those things we would not be in media.

35:55 We would not be in the journalism business because it's not a good business.

35:58 It's a fine business.

36:00 You can you can you can have a you know you can you can if

36:03 you're lucky at a good place you can raise a family and all that good stuff.

36:06 But what's true about independent media is they are purpose- driven.

36:10 We're doing this because we want to be publishing political journalism.

36:15 And to do that we want a business model

36:17 that works and we want to be able to, you know,

36:20 uh pay our our employees uh health care insurance and pay

36:23 them a good salary and all that kind of stuff.

36:26 But we do this because we care a lot about political journalism and the business

36:32 model stuff comes in after that to how do we how do we fund doing that?

36:38 So that is to me that's what makes uh independent media different.

36:42 It's purpose- driven while being forprofit.

36:45 Um, and if that sounds uh attractive to you,

36:49 and if the kind of editorial model and kind of writing

36:52 that Kate and I have described sounds of interest to you,

36:56 or maybe you're just super busy at your job,

36:58 but you still think it's important that such a thing exists,

37:01 by all means, subscribe.

37:03 Become a member of TPM.

37:04 It is quite literally um because of our members that we still exist.

37:09 Um, and you know, uh,

37:11 25 years is that's that's like a kind of a a a geological era,

37:17 right, in in in internet in in, uh, in internet history.

37:22 So, just for, uh, for people out there who maybe are already subscribers,

37:26 we really appreciate it.

37:27 And everyone else who's not, we invite you to join us.

37:32 And, and I would add, um, and you can add to this if you'd like, Kate.

37:36 Um I would add share the stories as you see them.

37:39 Uh yes because that as I say one

37:42 of the things the reason I always mention people by name

37:44 when I write is because I want people to understand

37:47 that we are in this business business of building

37:50 knowledge together and um and the the one

37:53 of the things that's so great about TPM talking points memo

37:56 is that it does reflect what people write in and what

37:59 different people say to each other um in it.

38:02 And so, um, so if you see stories like Democrats

38:06 huddle over Virginia while red states sprint to eliminate black votes,

38:11 uh, which is Kate's latest, uh, share it, uh, share it through email.

38:14 Make sure people know it's out there.

38:19 Um, go ahead, Kate.

38:20 I would just add um I just really like how you've talked about

38:23 it as building a network because I think in these days people are

38:28 feeling so demoralized and part of the authoritarian project is to make you

38:32 feel weak and in the minority and out of step with you know

38:37 the the cultural way that the country is going and so at a time

38:41 where I think a lot of people feel powerless it's it is

38:45 an expression of power to form a community with people who are reading

38:51 and writing and being creative about how we could emerge from this, you know,

38:57 intact and hopefully uh, you know, stronger and better.

39:01 Yes.

39:02 And it's a place of hope as well,

39:04 which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you all

39:06 is because there's there's great ideas there

39:08 as well as history about what's happening.

39:11 So, thank you both for coming and uh thank you for everybody for coming today.

39:17 um do take a look at talking points memo and best

39:20 of luck to the two of you with this membership drive but also

39:23 going forward I will continue to read with great enthusiasm and you

39:28 know maybe together we'll all change the world you never know.

39:32 Thanks so much Heather.

39:33 Thank you and everybody and everybody thank you for being here.

39:38 I'll talk to you soon.