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 – by several years – 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 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.
One of the biggest challenges facing news websites today is that people don’t go to websites. That makes it sound kind of total and even existential. But it’s really more a matter of distinguishing what you do from the mode through which you do it. Websites are no longer destinations for a lot of people. They get their news from social media, podcasts, newsletters. There are pros and cons to this for websites. The con is that most digital news organizations are built around being websites – less so now, but certainly at the beginning of this transformation. So that’s a con. There are pros too though. Websites are inherently passive in distribution terms. We wait for you to come to our front door every day. That’s good if the habit is well-ingrained, which in general it has always been for TPM Readers. But it’s still passive. With email newsletters we can show up at your front door every day. It allows us to be more active in our distribution and in the way we keep connected to our readers. These aren’t things we’ve come up with. We are reacting to changed news reading habits. It’s the same reason so many other news sites are becoming so newsletter focused.
You’ve seen these changes to TPM over the last couple years. But I want to focus in on something else.
Historically, a big, big thing for TPM was being super fast and being on top, fanatically on top, of the stories we were covering. That’s deep in the organization’s DNA. But late in the teens we realized that to a great degree social media – especially Twitter and its clones, but others too – were replacing this function. We could see it in our own reading habits. If there’s some new news on the Iran War or you want to know which corrupt SCOTUS decisions are out you go on Twitter or Bluesky. The way these sites aggregate a flow of breaking reports by journalists just serves that role better than we or really any other site can. It’s still journalists. It still often leads back to sites. But those social media sites are the front page.
So around the time of the pandemic, but not tied to the pandemic, we decided to ramp back our pace and focus more on deeply reported pieces. This never meant more reporting. It meant a slower pace of publishing and leaning more toward putting that reporting into more one-off, structured articles.
I was always instinctively wary of this decision. But I understood the logic of it, as I explained above. If you are used to one model, if to a degree you created that model, you’re always going to be wary of changing it. I try to be very aware of these kinds of blinders. But I think we went of course when we made that change. Specifically, I think we got away from what I see as our central mode of quick-paced iterative reporting, what I call storylines. Storylines are not a news story in the sense of an article and it’s not a topic – health care, reproductive rights, voting rights, democracy. It is a specific news story with characters in conflict of various sorts through time, with major issues at stake and often with a mystery at the heart of it. Who did it? Are they going to get caught? Is one player or another going to come out on top, succeed at what they’re trying to do?
Storylines don’t have to be scandals or wrongdoing. Far from it. But there’s a reasons we’ve often weighted in a bit in this direction because, as you can see above, they often fit very tightly into this kind of coverage. There’s always something more, a new development, a central mystery in the process of being revealed.
At one level these questions may seem trivial compared to the substance of the issues at stakes. But that’s wrong. We are a story-telling species and we understand the world around us through characters, people acting within it through time, a beginning point, a beginning mystery and a conclusion. There’s a reason we human gravitate toward the novel, to movies rather than datasets and spreadsheets. This is the most fundamental way in which we understand the world; it’s quite literally coded into our brains.
This is to me the best way to cover the news, especially for an audience made up of people who are really into political news and its impact on our world – political news obsessives, people with a deep and abiding interest. One thing this means is there’s no single treatment of a story in a single article. Everything is iterative. There’s always a next question to ask, a next piece of information that needs to be revealed. (To the extent this all gets compressed into a single article it becomes like set in amber, frozen, shorn of its dynamism and forward motion in time.) This also means that the nature of the new information dictates the format and genre of writing. Some new details only require short updates, sometimes only a sentence. It might be a chart or a quote. Other times it requires a detailed treatment. The key is remaining format or genre agnostic. Present the new information in the way most suited to that nature of the information itself. More mainstream news organizations are built around more casual news readers. And for them the single one off story can make sense. But we have a different kind of readership, people who are really into political news and don’t require a lot of stage setting with each new update. It’s a bit obsessive. It’s a task for news expeditionaries, not settled news bureaucracies.
What I’ve often told our team is that to the extent that we’re focused on structured, one-off articles we’re competing with the bigger, general interest operations on their own terms, not taking advantage of any of our inherent strengths. The Times has three or four hundred times as many reporters as we do. To the extent we’re competing with them in how we structure and approach the news we are going to lose every time.
So in addition to our newsletters, podcasts and so forth we are going to going to refocus on our true bread and butter which is iterative reporting. We’ll do it in a way that is less singularly focused on the website – because social media really has changed how we consume news. But we are going to be recommitting to the iterative reporting which has always been our bread and butter and also integrating this more tightly with our membership business, which in general will mean more things for our members.
If you’re asking yourself or me, what do I need to know here? Or, I don’t entirely understand what you’re describing?, my answer is: don’t worry. You don’t need to know or do anything. What I’m describing here is some refinements in how we prepare the food at the restaurant. All you need to do is decide whether you like how it tastes. I note these things here because I have an on-going dialog, stretching back decades now, with TPM Readers about how we are doing what we do, how the sausage is getting made, how that interweaves with the business model that sustains all of this. You should feel entirely free to ignore it and focus on the news we publish. But it’s there as an open invitation to understand a bit more about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and how it relates to broader changes in journalism and the business of journalism.
This year it also makes our Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive especially important. Because these kinds of changes and re-directions require significant upfront investment. And that’s one of the key roles the Journalism Fund plays for us, funds to invest in the operation, sometimes for new people but other times to make chances that allow the whole operation to thrive over time.
