It’s time to kick off this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. This fund is a critical part of what keeps TPM vital and strong. If you’ve contributed in the past — and especially if you haven’t — I hope you will take a moment this morning and join us in contributing. Just click right here. If you’re thinking you might get to it at some point, please take literally about a minute and a half and do it this morning. That helps us get to our goal all the quicker, and get back to focusing on the news 100% of the time.
This year we need to get to $500,000, and if we can get over that that will be great and a real assist. I explained here over the weekend why this year’s drive is particularly critical. TPM is a collaborative enterprise. It’s that way within our operation and from the literal beginning it’s been a collaboration with our readers, who gives us angles and tips and perspective on stories and who have our operation’s back with your financial support. It is a collaboration with you and today our team needs your support. We literally can’t produce what we are producing, play our — I believe critical — role in the news ecosystem without your contributions.
In the coming days I’m going to be sharing more about what we have planned over the next year and why the drive is so important. But for now, we need your help. Any amount gets us closer to our goal and helps us get there as fast as possible. It would mean so much to us if you could join with us today. It just takes stopping in your routine and giving us no more than two minutes today. Just click right here. We thank you.
Kate and I recorded an emergency insta-pod episode of the podcast to discuss the sexual assault allegation against Graham Platner which Politico published this afternoon. That pod will be on your devices shortly. It’s looked, since we recorded around 5 pm ET, that this was it for his campaign. Comments like “assessing the best path forward” are campaign speak for we’re pulling the plug. More news since then only confirms that apparent read.
I’ve been beating the drums for years about reforming the Supreme Court to bring its corruption and anti-democracy to heal. In general I’ve avoided getting very detailed about what reform would look like for two reasons. First, there are technical details I lack knowledge about and which others are more able to address. Second, my focus is on building support for the premise, the necessity of reform. Getting too bound up or identified with really specific reforms can get in the way of that.
However, I get asked this a lot. So I wanted to explain the outline of the reform path that makes the most sense to me. I put this forward as a concept, with the understanding that some points might need fine tuning either for technical or constitutional reasons.
Donald Trump now appears to have latched onto “communist” and the threat of “communism” as his new turnkey solution to the building anti-Trump wave set to crash in November. I would submit that the proper response to this is, “liar! crooked fool!” and go back to the offensive messaging. End of recommendation.
I wanted to take a moment to give you an update about the future of TPM. A phrase like that might sometimes sound ominous from another publication. This is not ominous. But it’s important. So I’d be greatly in your debt if you will give it a read. First — and this is relevant to what comes after — our annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive kicks off next week. If you are able I hope you’ll take a moment and join us by contributing.
One of the reasons TPM has survived and thrived as long as it has is because we’re nimble. We’ve been able to get the jump on major changes in digital journalism business models as well editorial models. Getting a big jump on the move to subscriptions and away from advertising is why TPM is still here when so many other smallish and not so smallish publications aren’t. Most of them tried to make the transition starting in the late teens when we were already in the middle of the storm. We started in 2012 and began growing that business in earnest in 2014. Those half dozen years or so made all the difference in the world.
We’re at another one of those inflection points as an organization. The Journalism Fund plays a critical role in helping us to fund those changes and make these transitions. In this post I want to share what some of those changes we’re now making are and why they’re important.
Happy Fourth, TPM Readers. If you’re interested in hearing what I and three other TPMers love about this country check out this week’s edition of the podcast. This week Kate and I (The TPM Show with Josh and Kate) got together with Joe Ragazzo and Josh Kovensky (The TPM Social Club) for a combined episode where we discussed the news of the week, our July 4th hot takes and what we love about this country. If you’re a regular listener it’ll be on your phone or other device or you can watch or listen here.
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A federal judge denied the Trump administration’s stay request Tuesday and will continue to block key sections of an executive order that would give the federal government unprecedented control of absentee voting.
