I want to start this introduction to the 25th Anniversary series of articles by telling you what an exciting and must-read collection it is. Our team has commissioned 25 articles on the history of digital media, which overlap in some way with the 25 years we are celebrating here at TPM this year. We asked for contributions from a wide range of contributors – people who first made their mark at different stages of digital media history, people who have worked in different parts of the digital beast, and people of very different political affiliations. We have Dave Weigel from Semafor on Elon Musk and X; Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara talks about the rise of Substack; Gawker founder Elizabeth Spiers on blogging; Marissa Capas of Handbasket talks about journalists as personal brands; Marcy Wheeler (The Empty Wheel) talks troll culture and the rise of Trumpism. This is only scratching the surface of the series we begin today, which continues during a two-day anniversary event in New York City in November 6 and 7.
I’d also like to thank every member of the current TPM team, the countless up-and-coming journalists who have toiled with us over the past 25 years and who have made this quarter-century possible, and you, our readers. It’s always been difficult to describe this site’s relationship with our readers, and even more so, my relationship with TPM readers without sounding like we’re falling into nostalgia or platitude. I can only tell you that all this is true. I had been writing professionally as a journalist for about three years when I started TPM, and I experimented briefly with a kind of proto-TPM at The American Prospect shortly before I left. At that time, I probably got few responses or comments to anything I wrote. In the first two or three weeks of writing TPM — when there were a few dozen readers — I received response after response. They gushed. They offered encouragement. They added additional information that I had not thought of; They pointed me to new pieces of news I hadn’t seen yet. If you’re not old enough or simply don’t remember, this was long before social media. So, being able to find newly published information, or even knowing how to search for it, has become crucial. As my network of readers expanded rapidly, I was discovering these stories faster than anyone else.
More than these individual practical advantages, the interaction was a revelation for me. I was drawn to this medium because I saw the opportunity to write the way I think, which is the way I talk. I wanted it. It seemed liberating to me. But I quickly discovered this mutual circular interaction. Journalism writing has been a completely one-way experience for me. I imagined an audience reading what I wrote in Prospect or Salon. But this was all largely fantasy. Now there was this double dimension to the whole dynamic. The combination of the ease of emailing and the conversational style in which I was writing brought people out of the woodwork. The more you write, the more information you get, the more ideas you generate. There was this virtuous cycle created by this intense interaction with readers, even when they numbered in the dozens and then in the hundreds. It is difficult for me to convey the excitement of this experience. It was a style of writing and a place where I could express my thoughts and impressions and, much more importantly, where all those quirks and idiosyncrasies of my personality (basically listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders under “Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder”) suddenly became pure advantages. There were times while running this site in 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, where you really felt, in a very small way, like you were running with history.
There were other little moments along the way that opened my eyes to other possibilities. I may have some details wrong here. But what I remember best is that sometime in mid-2003, Atreus (Duncan Black) announced on his blog that his laptop was dead and asked if people would pay the money for a new laptop. They did. My laptop was fine. But I remember thinking, the curse…This is something. Okay. That was the gist of my idea to ask readers to fund a newspaper trip to cover the New Hampshire primary a few months later. This served as a proof of concept for a series of future fundraisers that funded the launch of new TPM subsites from 2005 to 2007: TPMCafe, TPMMuckraker, and others. This led to increased experience and visibility that led to the launch of the membership program in late 2012, earlier than the vast majority of other sites. That’s why TPM still exists today, because of that one decision. By late 2010, when the storm actually hit, we already had about 20,000 subscribers and had enough time and revenue to see it the rest of the way.
Which brings me to what I wanted to discuss in this article – because in addition to introducing the series and offering some thanks, there was one point I wanted to make to put the whole series into context. What is the history of the last 25 years of digital media? Just over half that time was, first, a period of tremendous creativity and increasingly arrogant expectations, followed by another decade or more of sustained carnage.
Why was this so? The original sin of the entire digital media arc was the belief that digital media was part of the business of technology. This was the cause and effect of the boom in technology-based venture capital, which flowed into digital media starting in 2004 and 2005, just as the remnants of the dot-com bubble were receding in the rearview. Technology investors talk about “hockey stick growth.” This is what it looks like if you imagine a hockey stick as a growth chart with the blade facing to the left: a period of exponential growth followed by exponential growth that is straight up. Technology investors are happy to lose everything on nine out of 10 investments if they can get a single instance of hockey stick growth. It’s helpful to take a moment to understand how and why this makes sense in the technology economy. Profitability doesn’t really matter, not at the critical growth stage. However, if you’re not burning a lot of money, you’re probably not being aggressive enough. You are trying to grow quickly, create “network effects” and then “stick.” If you win the race to become Google or Facebook, the returns are beyond belief. And with network effects (think of that old story about Betamax and VHS) it will be difficult to dislodge you and your profitability will be huge. This basic framework is at the heart of the modern technology industry and the venture capital world that remains secretly tied to technology.
But journalism doesn’t work that way. Not because it’s important or noble or any other loud talk. There are no mesh effects and no locking. There is no advantage to news consumption that makes a news source better, cheaper, or more useful because everyone already uses it. If anything, quite the opposite. There is always a different way to cover the news, a different style, a higher or lower tone, a different ideological outlook. You would never invest in starting the right news and have it all blow up and suddenly have news like Google owns search or Stripe owns credit card payments. If you’re middle-aged or older, you grew up in a world of urban newspapers, a highly lucrative business before the Internet. They had a version of padlock because publishing printed newspapers was very capital intensive and distribution became more difficult (and less beneficial) over large distances. But of course, the Internet has completely changed that. No one outright said to themselves: This startup will be the news. But if you look closely at the period between 2005 and 2015 or so, you will find that these assumptions underlie hundreds of millions of investments in digital news. It never made sense. And so you get the carnage that we all know and that many of us witnessed firsthand. Eventually, investors realized that there were no network effects or lock-in, and the money was gone.
You had a whole generation of talented, intelligent, creative journalists who shone, produced amazing journalism, and made their names at publications that in the vast majority of cases never made a dime, often only pretending to be able to pay their debts. As I said, it’s the original sin of the digital journalism world. Digital journalism has never been part of the technology business. To use Warren Buffett’s metaphor, there simply were no good moats to justify aggressive investment in media startups during that critical decade.
And this was just one part of the great pincer movement in the world of technology that is eviscerating the world of digital journalism. The press has no network or closed-loop effects. But what we now call social media has certainly had an impact. It soon grew so large that it no longer needed journalism, found it unnecessary and entered the world we know today. And here we are.
I used to tell people that although there are all kinds of challenges to being a very small publication, there are some benefits. The first is that you should actually bring in more money than you spend. This is an important test of vitality and overconfidence. The other thing is that as a small publication, you never indulge in the fantasy that you can buck the industry trends you see around you. The volume of new investments and their successive rounds may support this illusion.
I say all this about network effects, insurance, and VC investing because at some point I bought into them, at least a little. I’m not sure I believed it, but I offered ideas based on her logic and made some decisions based on that as well. We were kind of in this go-getter mode in 2010, 2011, 2012. But over the course of 2012, you could already see some cracks in the edifice of the emerging digital journalism era. That’s why I was so focused on launching a membership program with the 2012 Elections Project. And that membership program, even though we didn’t have the organizational focus to build it aggressively until 2014 and 2015, is why this post still exists. Because of you.
Therefore, our readers are not just a source of advice, insight and commentary. They also had to be the basis of the work itself. That first year of the membership program – from late 2012 through late 2013 – was the most difficult and stressful in our 25 years of operations. I knew there were a lot of people inside and outside the organization who thought we were going up and down. But I had a plan to right the ship, and I was fully committed to it. In most ways, I feel more satisfaction in saving the organization that year than in creating it in the first place. The first was luck, being in the right place at the right time, and having the wind at your back. Now the wind is at my back again but blowing straight down. It took a lot of determination and a certain amount of inflexibility, and a lot of saying no over and over again to people who really wanted to hear yes. The key was to place business bets on things that TPM could do as well or better than anyone else.
Thanks for being there for us through it all. Enjoy the series.