The Growth of Talking Points Memo: A Case Study in Independent Media

By Joshua Micah Marshall, AlterNet. Posted October 6, 2008.

The following is adapted from the keynote speech by [Talking Points Memo blogger/publisher Josh Marshall at the inaugural symposium of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College in mid-September. Marshall won this year's Polk Award in legal reporting for coverage of the White House firings of U.S. attorneys, reporting that ultimately led to Congressional hearings and the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

We have ten employees. On any given month, we have one or two million readers. We are a combination of opinion journalism and traditional shoe-leather reporting. One of the first reporting sites we rolled out was TPMmuckracker.com. Investigative journalism is not usually a profit-center for most journalistic organizations, but we've tried to make it so.

The site started in November 2000 during the Florida recount. It wasn't just fortuitous, that was why it started. At the time I was the Washington editor of The American Prospect. Three or four months later, I quit the job at the Prospect, not to do TPM, but to be a freelance journalist. I was barely feeding myself, so I didn't have any money to invest. TPM was something I did on the side -- nothing I ever thought would make any income or be a business or be anything besides a sort of side project to my freelance journalism.

In 2003 and early 2004, a couple things happened -- not planned, kind of fortuitous -- that started the site off on the path to where it is today. One was a guy named Henry Copeland. He had a company called BlogAds, with this idea that there was a market for advertising on blogs ... since these were one-person operations, if he could be like the ad sales force for the blogosphere. I brushed him off for a few months and didn't sit down with him. Finally I did. I figured "What the hell, it can't hurt." By 2004, that was basically my income. The blog was supporting me through these ads.

The other thing that happened was -- as a freelancer, if you want to go to New Hampshire to cover the primary, you need an assignment. I got an idea from a blogger -- I believe it was Duncan Black, known online as Atrios. I think what happened is his computer had broken and he asked his readers to send him money so he could buy a new laptop. He came up with a new computer really quickly. It got me thinking: So I put up in November or so of 2003 an item saying, "I want to cover the New Hampshire primary for the blog." After 24 hours, $6 or $7,000 had come in. At the scale my finances were at the time, that was a very very big deal. I shut it off because I couldn't think of what I was going to do with $6 or $7,000 -- except for going out and buying a new car to drive up there.

After the 2004 election, it had become second nature to me to make use of the readership as a source of information. What I did on the site was a hybrid of traditional journalism and what we now call collaborative journalism -- working with readers. I did a lot of writing in the beginning of 2005 on President Bush's effort to privatize social security. I used readers to find individual members of Congress saying things in town hall meetings, and using that readership to access information, to follow the debate at the ground level in a way that traditional journalists weren't able to do.

Active Readership

Then in early 2005, there was the beginning of what has proved to be a series of corruption scandals, in this case Congressman Duke Cunningham. I was aggressive and used some of that collaborative journalism. The site's audience was growing. So I was getting more and more tips coming in from the readership.

I had been writing the blog more than full-time for four years and didn't want to just keep doing it that way for the next 10 or 20 years. So I had the idea that if I could hire a couple of reporters to do something like I was doing, we could make even more use of all this information that was coming in. I basically married that together with that $6 or $7,000 epiphany from the New Hampshire fundraiser and went to readers. The fundraiser for TPM Muckraker was successful beyond my expectations. We raised a little more than $100,000. This isn't in contributions of $5,000; this is people sending in $10, $25, maybe $50-the occasional $100 and $250. But certainly 90-95 percent was $50 and under. That basically gave me the money to build the site, rent an office and hire two reporters for a year. My expectation -- that proved to be true -- was that after a year, it would grow enough that we could sustain it through advertising.

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