I want to thank everyone who came out to see Kate Riga and me at our live podcast event last night in Chicago. You made us feel very welcome and we had a great time. And it was great meeting so many of you at the happy hour after the event. This was our first TPM event outside our home stomping grounds in New York City and Washington, DC. We were so happy with how it went.
For those who weren’t there, we brought probably more than half the TPM crew along with us. Jackie Wilhelm, Christine Frapech and Joe Ragazzo are the core team that makes these events and the podcast possible. But we brought a big chunk of the rest of the crew along as well. The podcast itself is the centerpiece of the event. But we want to meet you and vice versa. It’s just a lot of fun. But it’s also the TPM community that makes TPM not only possible but vital when so many other journalistic operations are just hanging on. This can sound like boilerplate, but it’s very real, very much the nuts and bolts of our operation.
I was telling one of our guests last night at the happy hour a bit about the transition that TPM made from being a 90% advertising-based operation to 90% membership-based operation over roughly the last decade. There were many positives about the advertising model. The negatives include its massive instability and even more the fact that our financial success and survival had only a very tenuous connection to the quality of the work we did. The advertising industry and even more the tech worlds are separate worlds with no real connection to us. They evolve according to their own logics and everyone else reacts or dies. The membership model is very different. We are dependent on a community of people who want to read and/or value TPM. We should be very well positioned to provide that. We should know how to do that literally better than anyone else. There are no guarantees of course. But everyone in our operation can and I think does know that what we get up to do each day is not only to create a quality publication but to contribute directly and materially to our joint and individual financial well-being and security. That relative connection between what you put into what you do with your days and what you get back out of it is something so many people never get a chance to have. That’s a good way to live in the world if you get the chance.
And what all that comes down to is that building and nurturing the TPM community is incredibly important to us. And that’s one of many reasons we are looking forward to many more such events around the country.
Thank you again, Chicago. We had a great time.
