Would you like to

Would you like to see wall-to-wall coverage of the New Hampshire primary on TPM?

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to going to New Hampshire in January to cover the primary – probably for the last ten days or so before the actual vote on January 27th. That’s about the time things really heat up and all hell starts to break loose. That’s more or less what I did in 2000 when I was the Washington Editor of the American Prospect, of which nothing more need be said.

Now, the normal way to do this would be for me to go to one of the publications I write for, get them to pick up the tab (hotel room, transportation, etc.), and write it up for them.

But that would mean saving most of the reporting for some magazine or website or newspaper and not doing much or any of it for TPM. And, frankly, I think blog coverage is much better suited to covering something like the New Hampshire primary than magazines or newspapers. Because it’s really about moment-to-moment reports, running commentary, and a lot of other stuff that doesn’t easily fit into the rubrics of conventional journalism. Besides, you want to know what’s happening while it’s happening, not in a lazy summing-up a week after the votes have been counted.

For better or worse I think the nomination battle will be largely determined in New Hampshire. That doesn’t mean the nominal winner will win the nomination. Not at all. But the primaries come fast and furious after January 27th (more than ever before) and the momentum or lack thereof coming out of New Hampshire will, I think, prove decisive.

We’ve tried to find various ways to innovatively combine blogging with traditional journalism. And this will be another experiment in doing just that.

In any case, what to do? I want to dedicate this trip entirely to blog coverage so I want to fund it with reader support, reader subscriptions. That’ll be part of the experiment too — whether this kind of independent journalism can come up with the resources to fund high-quality on-the-ground play-by-play reporting.

‘Subscription’ in this case doesn’t mean anything exclusive. TPM will be freely available to anyone and everyone who wants to read it, whether they’ve contributed or not, just like always. (And of course many readers have already generously contributed to the general upkeep of the site.) Here I’m using the term in a somewhat old-fashioned sense to refer to putting some money up, not for the general support of the site, but to fund a specific project you’re going to make use of or benefit from.

Anyway, you get the idea. Soon, we’ll be posting probably a graphic, more details, what we need to raise, and so forth. So more news to come. But if this is something you’d like to see happen, you can click here now (contributions no longer being accepted: thank you to all who contributed.) to put some money in the pot set aside specifically for the New Hampshire reporting trip.

Come on board. I think it’ll be exciting. More details to come soon …