I wanted to thank everyone who wrote in about my piece on the future of digital publishing, subscriptions and TPM. Obviously, we love it when people subscribe. If you haven’t, please sign up right now! But in addition to subscribing, it’s a great boon to me and our whole organization to hear from you about these issues that are so central to what we do, the kind of ever-evolving organization we’re trying to build.
Running TPM is a collaborative enterprise. This is true in the most obvious sense internally. There are twenty-some people each working incredibly hard, at least five days a week and usually a bit more to make this site happen. But it’s true externally as well.
When I started TPM almost 17 years ago I had little sense of what I was getting myself into. But the thing I got within the first days was that ready and fluid feedback from readers, even when they only numbered in the dozens, had a transformative effect on my writing, reporting and how I understood what I was doing. How thoroughgoing the difference was is often hard to capture for people or hard to convince them of. It’s sounds like pablum or boilerplate. But it’s not.
For years that was the case in how I reported stories, how I learned from readers who were experts in different areas that arose in the news but which I knew little or nothing about. It’s also the case with running the site, what we’re able to do, how our readers see what we do, what role we play in how they consume news, look for insight, commentary, even humor.
It’s obviously gratifying to read hear positive feedback. But it’s all the feedback, positive and negative and particularly the nuances and the specifics, that allows us to understand how to run the company. So the feedback, reactions, what you’d like more or less and feedback of all sorts is a critical touchstone for helping us and helping me understand the site’s possibilities and limitations, where we should steer and more.
If you haven’t read that post yet, if you have a moment, please give it a look. If you have thoughts you’d like to share, please drop me a line at our comments email address. And if you’re a regular reader who hasn’t signed up for Prime yet, please do. It is critical for the future of our enterprise.
