Happy New Year to everyone in eye-shot of this post! And especially, Happy New Year to our dedicated readers. Thank you from all of us here at TPM. Running this operation, with all the freedom it’s given me, the opportunities, is one of the great blessings of my life. And so I also want to thank and wish a great 2014 to the 20 odd people who help me run it.
I’ve seen over the last few days that a lot of people aren’t sorry to see 2013 go. I’m really, really looking forward to 2014 too. But I’ll confide something to you. For me, 2013 was a good year. And a good year for this organization. A really good year.
In fact, 2013 was the year that this organization – with a lot of work from a great staff – got back on track. It started with changes I began putting in place in the second half of 2012. Hard changes, ones that created turbulence and ones that only began bearing fruit by the Spring of 2013. But bear fruit they did. More focus. More discipline. And more stitching together the different, though overlapping, teams that make up the organization and binding them together into one functioning whole.
Particularly on the business side of the operation, we’ve been able to tighten and refine our model, get a better and more secure handle on how we generate the revenue that makes the editorial operation hum. Obviously, the business side of the operation isn’t something that really concerns readers who are really just interested in reading the articles and having them be accurate and timely and compelling. But having the business side of the operation strong and stable is critical to the health of the organization – and not just in the obvious sense that if there’s no revenue salaries don’t get paid. Business-side stability suffuses an entire organization, and vice versa. It creates the climate and the resources and the sustained attention that makes great things possible.
From then to today, it’s a transformed organization.
I suspect only some of that, perhaps not much at all, has been visible on the outside. But it has put us in a position where I’m confident you’ll start to see the changes and renewal in a major way in 2014 and into the future.
For me personally, the last year was the most enjoyable, fulfilling and satisfying since at least 2009. And I feel good saying that because I do so with no nostalgia but with expectations of much better things to come.
