Back when a good portion of TPM’s current staff was first getting into journalism in the mid-2000s, there was this idea that the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal were all the things of the past; that world was dying, and whatever was to come next, we were told, was in the process of being born. What would it be? You probably remember some of that era. There was a rush toward digital media startups, with investors pouring money into new outlets.
Now, many of them are gone.
TPM predated this frenzy by a little, and has outlasted it. And our community support is a big part of why we’re still around.
The hope for some in those years was that something new would win the attention of the news-reading audience that the newspapers once enjoyed, and this new thing would be staffed by journalists. That something new, however, did not turn out to be a news outlet, and did not turn out to be staffed by journalists. It was, unfortunately, social media apps.
The reason why many of the digital-native outlets of the aughts and 2010s are now gone or seriously diminished is because people didn’t develop a loyalty to any particular one of these startups, they developed a loyalty to the platforms that delivered those stories and the communities on those platforms: once Facebook, then Twitter, now a wide array of different Twitter-like successors and streaming platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. The news first reported by professional journalists ends up sliced and diced and resurfaced and echoed in some form across billions of feeds on innumerable platforms, some of which you and I have likely never heard of. With the time of easy money gone, we see some news outlets continuing to try and squeeze out the dregs from investors, promising novel newsroom uses of AI or a supposedly savvy editorial position that tells the money-havers exactly what they want to hear, regardless of its grounding in reality.
TPM, fortunately, is different, and it is why we’ve been able to survive as long as we have. We know we’re not going to change the news industry, and we don’t need to. We rely on you, our community of readers. We’re not making some grab for the attention of the social media-scrolling masses. Sure, we’ll take it, but we don’t need it. We have something fairly unique here: a loyal readership and a gradually growing group of members with whom we are deeply connected.
This is why we come to you periodically and ask you to support us. It’s that time now, so please, if you have the resources to do so, we hope you will contribute.
What you get in return is not a tote bag, and not (or not just) a warm fuzzy feeling for having supported us and made us happy. We’re a news outlet doing something unique: community based, community sponsored national political journalism. We are not funded by Wall Street or Silicon Valley, and we do not need to come up with contrivances to keep those masters of the universe sending us their cash. We are funded by you, the people who read us and find us valuable. It’s great! We are proud to be part of this experiment, one that continues year after year.
