At this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, memories of office life are a bit hazy. Commutes have shrunk from crowded subway rides to a few short steps between bed and desk. Coffee breaks amount to another refill from the kitchen.
But TPM has always had offices that match the site’s idiosyncratic operation. Josh Marshall started the site working hours at a Washington, D.C. Starbucks. These were pre-Grady’s Cold Brew days, if you can believe it. Later, when Josh moved to New York, the TPM crew settled into a cozy office in Manhattan’s Flower District.
“We had a mouse die in the wall of that space, which made the place almost un-occupiable,” Josh recalled. “It was almost impossible to be in there.”
In 2009, amid another expansion of the company, TPM moved to where it remains (at least physically) today, a handful of blocks south, on the edge of Chelsea and Flatiron. It’s conveniently a stone’s throw from Trader Joe’s, where much of the staff would load up on groceries during a break.
The offices in Washington were a similarly scrappy operation. David Kurtz was living in Missouri while trying to navigate D.C. commercial real estate. After a temporary sublease, TPM’s fledgling D.C. team in 2010 moved into what was essentially an apartment, complete with working shower and bedroom/office.
“We’re doing this journalism thing that everyone’s paying attention to and at the same time we’re just scratching and clawing to make the whole thing work,” David recalled.
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Why did TPM move from DC to NYC?
I like to fantasize …Post-Covid, where will be the next TPM evening affair? I was lucky to attend one in DC and one in NYC (March, just as the s**t was entering the fan’s air stream).
Because NYC is better.
The best writing about national affairs often comes from people outside the DC bubble. The best DC-based journalists often seem to have beats that require a DC presence (e.g., Dana Priest on intelligence and security matters—I still miss her reporting) and connections to the peculiar communities that exist here. But for the big picture, it’s often better to be somewhere else. It’s too easy for people to be like Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman or Bob Woodward or to approach stores in the same way.
It didn’t. Not really. I lived and worked in DC until late 2004. But TPM’s first employees were hired, first office etc. in New York. So TPM as a company started in NY. I moved to New York because my now-wife lived there. So my move was purely for personal reasons.
Having said this, I think the move to New York ended up being a very good thing for TPM, even though it terrified me professionally at the time. It allowed TPM to always be looking at DC largely from the outside.
One can argue that New York is part of the same northeastern metroplex. And that’s true to a significant extent. But it’s still quite different from being based in DC.