Progressive news organization ThinkProgress is shutting down.
The news outlet, which was an editorially independent project of the liberal think tank Center For American Progress, will cease operations Friday and be folded into the think tank’s overall online efforts, according to a CAP statement Friday. The Daily Beast first reported the development.
The site’s shutdown comes after it was reported in July that CAP was putting its flagship news site up for sale and was in search of a new publisher.
Navin Nayak, executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said in the statement Friday that CAP was “left with no choice but to close ThinkProgress” after an unsuccessful two-month search involving conversations with more than 20 potential new publishers. Sources told The Daily Beast Friday that there were three potentially serious buyers in consideration recently.
“Given that we could find no new publisher, we have no other real option but to fold the ThinkProgress website back into CAP’s broader online presence with a focus on analysis of policy, politics, and news events through the lens of existing CAP and CAP Action staff experts,” Nayak said in the statement.
A CAP aide told The Daily Beast that a dozen ThinkProgress employees will lose their jobs. The CAP aide also said that laid off ThinkProgress staffers will be given a severance package that runs through the end of November and health care coverage that lasts through the year.
In a series of tweets Friday afternoon, ThinkProgress founder Judd Legum — who had left the news organization last year — reacted to the site’s shutdown. Legum tweeted that the decision to fold ThinkProgress back into CAP is a “mistake.”
1. I founded @thinkprogress and spend a decade of my career building it from scratch and I just found out it was being shut down from this Daily Beast article https://t.co/umARE6Pb3G
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) September 6, 2019
3. (Quick note to trolls: Sorry, but I didn't lose my job. I left ThinkProgress over a year ago.)
ThinkProgress started before the HuffingtonPost, before the DailyBeast, before Twitter, before Facebook
And it had a big impact
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) September 6, 2019
5. It also underscores my belief that we need more progressive media that is not only independent, but self-sustaining.
Donors are great until they jump ship.
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) September 6, 2019
They lost their advertising dollars, IIRC, when their website was tagged by Google, and had been asking for donations for over two years. If progressives weren’t supporting them, they just weren’t going to survive.
That’s a shame. I frequent only a few liberal sites and have enjoyed more than a few articles from Think progress over the years.
There was a 2015 article in the Intercept that CAP pressured ThinkProgress writers to not criticize Israel. That’s when I started to not pay attention to them.
This makes me incredibly sad. Such a good bunch of writers, reporters, and investigators. Good damn reporting there. Really, Dems? No one could find a liberal billionaire to help keep it going? What a fucking shame.
That sucks. ThinkProgress was one of the three websites I read all day and the one I use most for policy news, as opposed to the political gossip stuff TPM posts or the ridiculous amount of news-analysis Steve Benen writes on Maddow’s blog.
Now I feel kinda bad that I never became a member, but I didn’t have the personal connection I do with TPM so I didn’t bother even after they explained how desperate they were. (And yes, I’m secretly a member here under a fake name. I just don’t like to brag about it.)