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Yesterday we were 220 sign-ups away for our goal of 1000 new sign-ups for the first week of our annual Prime sign-up drive. Now we’re at 132. We can totally get there. I just noticed as I was starting to write this post that The Village Voice is shutting down for good. That caught my attention in a big way. There’ve been so many stories like this over the last couple years — publications that either went under or are living on as zombies, names bolted on to some new shabbier thing, shaming what they once were. It is probably always tempting to use fear as a motivator. But I won’t do that and indeed cannot do that. Because that’s not going to happen to TPM. I raise the example of the Voice because the reason I can be so confident is precisely because we here at TPM — us and our readership — have already come so far in building a business model that highly, highly insulates us from the forces in the advertising, tech and platform industries which are destroying so many publications. This is why you see me writing all these posts, joking, finger-wagging, descriptive, antic, thoughtful. Because I believe so much in what we’re doing. We are not simply surviving. We are building and we have confidence in the future because we started early building a different kind of model which is better for journalism, better for business and better for everyone who either as a staffer or as a reader has a relationship with this site. But we need to get the whole way there. So if you haven’t subscribed yet take this moment to do it. Click right here.