Do you have five minutes to answer a few questions? We aren’t offering any gift card drawings, but on your deathbed you will receive total consciousness – which is nice – and you will help us learn more about how we can improve and adapt TPM to this increasingly volatile news environment. All answers are confidential and used only for internal research. Thank you!

Yesterday I wrote that a subset of users were experiencing a couple issues. We now believe this issue has been resolved. The source of the problem was some server maintenance work gone awry by one of our hosting partners. But our crack team of developers figured out what was going on, notified the partner, and they were able to fix the issues last night.

Thanks to all the readers who wrote in, was a big help. Teamwork makes the dreamwork.

Also, if you aren’t a member, how about changing that today?

We are aware of an issue currently affecting some users that prevents them from accessing site features and also displays the wrong number of ads. Specifically, we believe it’s affecting users from the greater Chicago area.

If you are experiencing this issue, you could help us resolve it by letting us know if any of the following are true for you:

• You are NOT from the greater Chicago area.
• Logging into TPM while on another network resolves the issue. For example, if you have trouble using the site on your mobile device while on a wifi network, but not  when wifi is off and you are using cellular data.

You can contact us at siteissues at talkingpointsmemo dot com.

Getting this fixed is the top priority and we apologize for the inconvenience.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss DeSantis Descending: Josh and Kate discuss the continued flailing of the Ron DeSantis campaign and some last minute chaos around Hunter Biden’s plea deal.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

TPM is a small company and at small companies, people have various responsibilities that at larger companies would each be handled by different people, or even entirely different departments. Some larger media outlets might have whole fundraising teams. We do not. And so, over the last three weeks, TPM’s staff has been talking about our TPM Journalism Fund drive and explaining how it fits into what we do.

Yet, the fact remains I am TPM’s publisher and so my ultimate responsibility is to make sure TPM brings in more money than it spends. So answering the question, “Why do you ask people to give you contributions?” falls, ultimately, to me. Why have memberships if you are just going to ask for money? Why don’t you sell more ads? Why don’t you have an events business? Why don’t you sell merch? Are you simply bad at being a publisher?

All fair questions, especially the last one! So here I want to explain why we have the TPM Journalism Fund. There’s a short and a long explanation. I think through other posts and through various pitches on the site, you’ve seen the short explanations: We face a particularly challenging financial year in a particularly challenging industry and rather than shrink in size, we want to keep our momentum going. In the past, we’ve said we’ll use the contributions from the TPM Journalism Fund to expand our investigative capacity and provide free memberships to readers who need them. These are good and true reasons. If this is all you need to hear, then by all means go right here and contribute. But if you are looking for a deeper explanation, stick around.