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When the White House declared last month that reporters would no longer have free access to the West Wing offices of press secretary Karoline Leavitt and other top communications officials, the staff at Talking Points Memo was relatively unfazed. The progressive political blog, which turns twenty-five this month, launched its Washington vertical in 2009 with the informal motto “In it but not of it.” TPM has used its outsider status to its advantage, getting scoops on stories like George Santos’s credit card fraud. “The access that news organizations had at the Pentagon and the White House is very important. They should have it. Hopefully they will get it back,” Josh Marshall, TPM’s founder and editor in chief, said. “But those are never where big stories are going to come from.”

Marshall was thirty-one years old and working at the American Prospect when he founded TPM in 2000. White House hopefuls George W. Bush and Al Gore were duking it out over the Florida recount, and the crisis became fodder for Marshall’s first, 254-word TPM post. “In the twenty-five years since, we have had escalating crises where each one seems much, much worse, and things that seemed bad at the time now seem semi-quaint,” Marshall said. “And here we are in a crisis that is much, much graver.” 

Today, Marshall can count TPM among the left-leaning political blogs that have made it, with a newsroom of more than a dozen staffers and more than thirty-five thousand paying subscribers who account for most of its revenue. But Marshall is not resting on his laurels. “A very important goal is remaining in existence. We cannot take that for granted,” he said. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

LS: Why did blogs appeal to you in the first place? 

JM: I have a bit of a frenetic personality. The speed and the ability to keep coming at something, I think, appealed to me very early on. And there’s an intimate and conversational aspect of the writing that I like, that comes naturally to me, and that I’m kind of good at. When I was starting off as a journalist, I wanted to be one of those people who does long-form magazine journalism. And I did that, but I was not that good at it. There are these people who can plot out and pace a six-thousand-word piece, and it’s beautiful, and it comes together. My brain was not structured for that. But I could do this more conversational, shorter thing really well. So for me, it was one of these things where this new medium was becoming possible, and I think at some level I realized that’s the one thing I can actually do well, so I’m going to do that. 

Have you learned anything over the decades about being an outsider publication that’s relevant now, as the Trump administration expels mainstream outlets from the Pentagon and parts of the West Wing? 

In some ways, this climate reminds everybody that the core relationship is an adversarial relationship. You cannot expect any political entity to be helping you find out their secrets. That’s in the nature of the thing. 

So when I think about this, I try to hold in my mind both things: that these restrictions are bad, they matter, it is important, and yet you get big stories by finding out things that people in power do not want you to find out. So it’s a good reminder for journalists of the true nature of the relationship—not that the other stuff is fake, or whatever, but you’re not going to get the big story by having the run of the press area at the White House. These restrictions limit the public’s right to know. But there’s also this thing we can fall back on, which is that, at the end of the day, we need aggressive and smart journalists who are really committed, who are going to find out stories that are important. And that is still possible.

How has TPM changed over the past quarter century, and how has it stayed the same? 

Needless to say, a lot has changed. There was basically a four- or five-year period where it was just me writing constantly, and that was what it was. I had no idea what I was setting up in the very beginning, but I had a certain way that I wanted to cover the news, with a certain sensibility and a certain candor. We’ve stayed true to that. I describe TPM as a tabloid for smart people. I wanted to punch you in the face with headlines that are edgy and over the top and make clear that political news is not like eating your wheat germ or having a lot of fiber in your diet. It is a spectacle, and it is fun, in a way, and it is something to be excited about. We want you to be engrossed by it, to be entertained by it. We also want you to think what we’re talking about is important, but we want those things together. 

You’re still TPM’s majority owner. Have you ever considered giving up some control over TPM or selling to outside investors? 

There were all sorts of new-media startups around 2008 getting huge amounts of money and growing very rapidly. At that time, a lot of rich people came to me and wanted to invest. Marc Andreessen was very interested. But I realized that there are a lot of ways that you can lose control of a company, even if you remain the majority owner. The reason TPM didn’t blow up and become like the Huffington Post or something like that is I made a very conscious decision. I couldn’t accept the idea of doing something that could lead to me losing control. 

I think I’m a pretty good businessman, probably better than I am on the editorial side. I say that with confidence because in any financial sense, if you look at what happened over the decade from 2010 to 2020, journalism just stopped being a business that made any sense to be in if you wanted to make money. One reason that TPM continues to exist is that I was personally committed to there being a TPM because I thought it was important. It was what I liked doing, and I didn’t want to do something else, so I was going to do everything I conceivably could to keep it existing. This is also why I think having ownership close to the journalism is really important. It is a chaotic and unstable and bad business, but if you have an owner who is really committed to the journalism and also really feels a personal need to keep the thing going, that changes the equation. 

It’s really noteworthy that TPM is still independent. Among TPM’s peers, neither Slate nor Salon is independently owned. 

I don’t mean this in a valorizing sense, but we have always been pretty unique in that there aren’t many companies like us. I mean that just in a very operational sense of scale, access to capital, not having a larger corporation behind us—something that in an earlier period sometimes felt like a big disadvantage. 

More recently, it feels like a big advantage. There’s no one who can do to us what Condé Nast just did to Teen Vogue. And obviously, this is just the most recent example. Salon and Slate and those kinds of quasi-niche digital publications that go way back—I definitely think about those as our peers. But Slate started off as a mini-project of Microsoft, one of the biggest companies in the world, and Salon had its own hotshot Silicon Valley phase. Throughout TPM’s history, we’ve always been something like Slate and Salon, and we’ve always been a little like traditional small political magazines. When we were more in the advertising world, our competitors were places like Politico. So we’ve always had several peer sets, and yet we’re pretty unique. 

As advertising dollars dried up, TPM was early to adopt a membership model, which has become common now. How has that played a role in your longevity? 

In digital media, from 2009 to 2012, everything was going gangbusters, but I didn’t think it was going to last. In 2012, I saw things in the social world and in the advertising world that didn’t seem sustainable to me, and I became very focused on starting a membership program. We needed to start selling subscriptions to TPM. I decided we needed to launch this thing before the election, when everybody’s paying attention. It was sort of slipshod, but that’s the reason TPM still exists. Our subscription business funds us, but we were able to build a subscription business because we always had a very tight and bonded relationship with our readers. That was from the very beginning. We were able to do it because we had readers who were very committed. 

I’m not sure if other sites went wrong. In a lot of ways, they weren’t as lucky as we were. But a lot of places got mesmerized by what I would call a theoretical audience—the metrics that tell you that you have ten million uniques. But that’s not an audience. That is your role in the eddies and currents of the internet. That’s not people who are really invested in you continuing to exist, and we didn’t lose sight of that. Getting spellbound by notional audience numbers was meaningful, in some ways, in a certain advertising era, but it was not a real audience. 

Do you think there’s more of an appetite under the second Trump administration for the kind of journalism that TPM does? 

I think that there is. One part of it that is very bad for the country, but possibly not bad for us, is with things like ABC basically giving this bribe [by donating fifteen million dollars to the Trump presidential library and one million dollars to cover legal fees], or what happened with CBS and Paramount. One of our big selling points is we’re independent. We say this in our agitprop, that there’s no big corporation that’s telling us what to do, or that is going to decide out of the blue that they want to get out of the journalism business. We’re not answering to someone else.

That has always been important for a lot of different reasons, but starting at the end of last year, it began to seem a lot more important. It ceased being a theoretical thing and became something very practical. Everybody was becoming obedient to Trump because of the power he has right now. And that is why, in the second Trump administration, there is more of a demand for us. 

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