Last year I told you we were shifting our business model to a greater reliance on subscription revenue and as a core part of that decision redoubling our commitment to investigative reporting, muckraking in the TPM tradition and original reporting of all sorts. You, our readers, have matched our hopes and ambitions. So today I sent this staff announcement to the TPM team, explaining two key staffing moves as we build toward those goals.
Team,
As we get the new TPM Investigations Desk off the ground, I have two big staff announcements.
First, I’m promoting Tierney Sneed to become the second member of the Investigations Desk. Tierney has been at TPM for just over two years and has done consistently great work on a range of Capitol Hill and policy issues ranging from health care and the Supreme Court to our longstanding core focus on voting rights and voter suppression. Tierney will be a great addition to the Investigations Desk, bringing her crackerjack reporting skills along with a deep immersion in our style of iterative reporting. Tierney switches roles on August 1st.
That brings the Investigations Desk team to two. David and I are actively hunting for the third member of the team and will keep you posted on our progress.
Along with Tierney’s move from the congressional/DC team to the Investigations Desk, we are also making a major investment in our DC and campaign coverage going into next year: We’ve hired Cameron Joseph, currently DC Bureau Chief of The New York Daily News.
Cameron began his DC reporting career at The Hill. He is in his second stint at the Daily News, which was interrupted by a brief sojourn at Mashable. He joins TPM in a new position as our new senior political correspondent, and we expect to have him on the road consistently during the 2018 campaign season. Cameron joins us on July 18th.
As we’ve discussed, the Investigations Desk represents a major new investment in investigative journalism, muckraking and original reporting. But we are not going to let our politics and policy franchise languish. Quite the contrary we want to break more news on that front too. I’m excited to see what Cameron and Alice will do on that front.
Let me add one other point about these changes and our general strategy going forward.
While Cameron will be on the campaign and politics team in DC, when we hired him, we were quite aware of how his sources and experience would help us leverage the work of the Investigations Desk. This is a more general point. While the Investigations Desk is going to be the focus of our digging on the Russia probe and other investigative and muckraking projects, I do not see this as an isolated effort within the organization. Just as there’s no bright line distinction between the news writing and reporting teams, I do not want hard and fast divisions here either. I am looking for all of us on the editorial team to be part of our broadening ambitions as a news organization.
We are a small organization that has always prided itself on punching well above its weight. Fundamentally, we are one news battalion attacking the news everyday, drawing on everyone’s strengths, being flexible and creative as the news evolves.
I’m really excited about what we’re going to be able to accomplish this year. As always, if you have questions, let me know.
