Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo, has spent 25 years steering a small, independent newsroom through every shift in digital media. He discusses how TPM survived the traffic era, why it avoided venture capital, and what he calls the “small-boat strategy” — building for resilience, not scale.

Welcome to the Rebooting Show.

I'm Brian Morrissey.

This episode is brought to you by Beehiiv.

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and we're gonna continue this through next year.

So you'll be hearing more about Beehiiv.

I recently switched over to Beehiiv, so I do encourage you to check it out.

I've found the tools that they provide.

More powerful, than the ones that I had previously used.

And last week we actually partnered on a breakfast where we gathered

together a group of product and revenue leaders from leading publishers.

And I think the biggest thing that stood out to me is how much these

businesses, are in a time of change as they look to rebuild the direct

connections to their audience.

Now, the wrinkle to this.

Is that I found that many of these businesses still have to operate the

old traffic based model while they build the new audience focused model.

And that is a difficult, burden to, to bear.

And that's why I think in many cases, you know, newer, Newer

models have a leg up in that.

But I think that there are obviously still strengths, with, the more

legacy models that are adapting.

And it also echoed my conversation that I'd had with Josh Marshall,

the founder of Talking Points Memo.

Josh is one of the end Talking Points Memo, or one of the last

survivors of the blog year.

I mean, I remember that moment.

You know, in sites like Talking Points, memo, daily Costs, or

the Daily Dish, even Gawker.

You know, we're forerunners really of this shift from institutions to

individuals that we're seeing and has been branded as the creator

economy, more than two decades later.

TPM is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and you know, most of its peers from that

era have either faded away altogether.

Or become something unrecognizable as they've entered, what Troy calls the

harvesting phase of their lifecycles.

TPMS Mere existence is a profitable, stable business, deserves

some examination as to why.

And Josh was nice enough to, walk me through it.

You know, he credits.

The choice to forego any dreams of being the next media mogul and a critical

decision at the height of the traffic era to get off that treadmill and go down

what at the time was an uncommon path.

He watched his peers chase scale, you know, raising venture capital and hiring.

Giant newsrooms and he saw what he calls the original sin of digital media, and

that is confusing the growth patterns of journalism with how technology scales.

So TPM made a bold choice in late 2013.

It would shift to an audience focused membership business.

It would still sell advertising, but the weight of its efforts would go to building

recurring revenue, turning its audience into customers rather than the product.

That Alignment gave the company critical ballast compared to more volatile ad

businesses that depended on the fickle traffic patterns, from tech platforms.

And today, TPM gets roughly 90% of its revenue from subscriptions.

It probably isn't the most scalable model, but it's far more reliable.

And most importantly, I think it gives TPM and and publishers that get on

this path, a degree of sovereignty that you simply do not have when you

depend on traffic from tech platforms that you're gonna then monetize.

Through an ad system that you mostly don't control.

So Josh looks at this as a pure practicality, which I

really appreciate personally.

'cause he describes himself as like a small business

owner, not as an entrepreneur.

And it's a distinction I greatly appreciate because the media,

businesses of today and tomorrow will increasingly look this way.

Also, I mostly have read Josh over the years for his political

writing, but what always struck me was how precisely he could write

about programmatic advertising.

It's something we discussed in this because he treated it

the way he treats politics.

You follow the incentives and you'll understand the system and

what he saw, and this was what led to that decision in late 2013.

Was that the system was designed really to fail publishers.

And so in this episode we talk about what it takes to survive 25 years in digital

media, what TPM got right about membership and what everyone else has missed about

monetization in the attention economy.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation I know I did.

if you do, please share it with someone.

and also leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcast.

Always like to hear your feedback.

My email is brian@therebooting.com.

Now here's my conversation with Josh.

Josh, welcome, to the podcast.

Congrats on 25 years.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And, and, thanks for having me.

I was joking before we got on that, like anyone in this business who has

been running a digital, media operation for 25 years is like the, the World

War II veterans that are like produced

Yep,

a year.

you've had, like, you've gone through a bunch of different, of these eras

and he started in the blogging era.

Right?

So I.

Yep.

I was like reminded, you know, with Curtis Lewa now being talked about

a lot, that, like people don't remember a lot of, a lot of things that came before.

And the blogging era was the forerunner.

it was a different time and we started obviously in 2000 and,

you know, blogs were a thing and.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, they were, and, and, you know, one thing that, as I look back on it now, one

of the key things about the blogging era is that it was the pre-social media era.

and that was, that was so critical to it because, because, you

know, there were some aspects of.

blocking existed before, 2000 and 2001.

The political blogosphere as,

as something that was like a, you know, a, a number of different sites and kind

of had a, had a whole valence to it that was, a lot of, that was tied up

with the Bush administration, you know, and, and, and people wanting alternative

sources of news and stuff like that.

a lot of it is people.

I think people today have a hard time, even people who were.

Around then and operate in, in that context.

It's hard, it is hard to remember to put ourselves back in the framework of just

how hard it was to find information.

and that is one aspect of, of what blogging was about.

you know, alternative media, a more, a more informal kind of reader, engaged kind

of media, but also pre, pre-social media.

A lot of it was, you know, Finding out about news that the big, you know, the big

outlets weren't focused on, and that's not just a matter of, Wanting to hear

from people who had a different viewpoint.

Often it was, oh, you know, this story, this new story is happening in San

Diego, or it's happening in Des Moines.

And how do you find out about that?

Well, blogs because there was a lot of, you know, reader

engagement and stuff like that.

Often things like that would bubble up, in, in the blog world.

So it was a very, It was kind of a, you know, a, a, a crazy time and, and it was

just a very, very different environment than anything we have today in so many,

you know, in so many different ways.

Even though it was in the internet era,

Right.

Yeah.

And there's kind of, I mean we'll get to it, but there, there is like sort of

revival of that, I guess, and the energy around like substack and independent

voices, and I think some of that, everything comes back in fashion, right?

And a lot of the, a lot of the sort of things is being closer to, to

the audience, being more informal.

Like a lot of the things like Echo, right?

But the incentives are obviously very different in, in, in

this, in this environment.

and that's something that you've been part of for 25 years, which is responding

maybe against your will to the incentives of the systems in which media exists.

Well that, you know, that's one thing, and I, I've told people this.

Inside TPM at various stages of, of the company's history that there

is, you know, there are a lot of downsides to being a very small

company and a small organization, but there are also some plus sides to it.

And one of them is that you are never under the illusion

that you can buck the trends.

That are surrounding you.

You are a small boat on a big ocean, and you have to navigate that ocean.

And when you're really big, you can, you can fool yourself for a long time

and with a lot of money to burn, to thinking you are gonna buck the trends.

But when you're small, you know, you are not going to buck the trends.

You n you have to.

The ocean is the reality that you live in and you need to adapt

to that and navigate within it.

And so that can, if you are.

I think if people running media companies are, have their ears open for that,

that can give you a certain advantage.

I mean, maybe this is a way of, you know, repackaging deep disadvantages

as advantages, but you know, you have to take your advantages

where you, where you find them.

and that can allow you to be more reactive.

You know, I think about, know, some of the things that happened to even the big

operations, like, like the times and the posts say in the first decade of this

century, or that happened with a lot of the big, VC-backed, startup publications

in the second decade of, of this century.

And a lot of those problems were based on, or, or.

Exacerbated by thinking like, well, this is a challenge, but we're

gonna outsmart that challenge.

Well, no, you're not.

Right.

You're, you're not going to outsmart that challenge.

You're gonna need to react to it.

So yeah, that has been, something very basic, to us for forever and, you know,

that is, there's, I would say there's a number of decisions that, that we

made over the course of 25 years that.

We're very early and we saw things early, and we started doing things

very early because again, you're small,

you're not gonna, you're not gonna buck the trend.

And so for just, one thing that really jumps to mind to me because it has really

just shaped the arc of the last dozen years of our history is that, we started

a membership program at the end of 2012.

That was way before anybody else was doing it.

And actually there were things that I was looking at in 2011 and 2012 that made

me think like, this is not gonna work.

And not, not just like, it's not gonna work for us, but

the whole thing isn't working.

The whole scale,

The traffic era you're

The traffic era basically.

And, and the business underpinning of the traffic area with, with a certain kind of

ad monetization and so forth?

Often programmatic, which is indirect.

yes.

Both.

Yeah.

Programmatic.

Well, the growth of, it's a series of things.

One is, the concentration in what was, you know, we used to call direct

advertising, the increasing, the ways that programmatic was, being cut into by

the social platforms, and, and not just cut into beings like, you know, Borg by

the, by the, by the social platforms.

and I remember I was, we actually the actual launch of our membership program.

Was was very shambling because I, I, I got this idea in like the middle of 2012

and I was like, we gotta, I, I have to launch this before the election because

if you're in the political news business

that the, an election is when you have a, you know, a lot of audience.

and so I sort.

Did everything I possibly could, and a lot of things I wasn't able

to do to get the thing launched before, before the election in 2012.

In any case, you know, it took us, it took us another, year or two before we

had things lined up in a way that we could really start building that, you

know, building that subscription business like around early 2014 and so forth.

But.

When, when the crisis really hit, which I would say was sort of 20 17, 20 18,

we already had like 20,000 subscribers.

so we were in a position to not, not that it was easy, it was, it was

still desperate, but we were in a position to nav to, to survive that.

And that's one of the, you know, that's one of the, you know, kind of key

moves that allow us to be here today.

Yeah, I mean, 'cause that, that was when, you know, the Facebook

traffic hose got turned off and I think it became very clear then that

relying entirely on advertising is gonna be a very difficult proposition.

yeah.

Yeah.

Not, not workable at all.

And, and you know, it's funny that one of the, one of the things that I think

has always been, an advantage to, and just, just for kind of clarity, My, for

the first 20 years of the organization's history, I ran every aspect of, of

the business side of the organization.

Obviously I have people who, who work for me, but I mean, I was, you

know, the per, very

hands-on running each aspect of it.

And it's been a little different over the last five years or so.

Well.

More than a little different.

We, we now have a publisher who would, who, had worked

with me for a number of years.

I made him, you know, gave him the publisher job.

So basically, I, I'm, I'm less hands on today, and for the last four or five years

than I, than I was, previous to that.

but, I think a big advantage that we had is that if you are deep in

the nitty gritty of things like, you know, 20 14, 20 18 ERA programmatic

advertising, or for that, for that matter, 2005 ERA programmatic advertising.

You see things.

That you're not necessarily gonna see, you're certainly not gonna see if you're

the vast majority of journalists, but you're also not gonna see if

you're like, if you're most media executives because you're, you know,

third party or programmatic, you know, that's, that's not where the,

that's not where the stars are, right?

That's, that's not where the, where the,

big money is.

You're not looking really close.

So being hands-on in the business side and really in the trenches

also gives you some advantages.

What were you seeing then?

Because I mean, you.

I, I don't wanna say like turned against programmatic advertising or something,

but like, I mean, you, you, you sort of, you know, you made the choices that

you made and you saw that you, you saw that advertising was not the path to go

down and advertising was at the time the sort of, I guess that was the consensus,

sort of like the Washington consensus.

I mean, that was the consensus at the time.

Yeah.

Well, and as you say, the consensus also, you know, based on scale,

they all, they all go together.

I think that, you know, a few of those things were the way the, for

direct advertising, we were always in the DC advertising space, which

is a very unique, environment.

You mean like public affairs?

yes.

Which is in some ways it's a part of the advertising world.

That is it.

In effect kind of.

Yeah.

It's part of the lobbying budgets of corporate America basically.

So it's, so it's unique.

basically there were a number of ways where that was starting

to get very stratified, say in the first Obama administration.

Not because I'm just kind of, it had nothing to do with the

Obama administration, just

kind of lining it up with errors.

Became, very stratified.

And, at first we actually made a heavy pivot back to programmatic

advertising because I had, I had in the, let's say, in the 2000 5, 6, 7 era.

The whole thing in digital media was direct advertising and what

you didn't sell through direct advertising, you did through third

party advertising, you know, kind of,

uh, cash on, you know, exactly.

Just, just the leftovers.

They called it remnant,

you know, it's a good, a good sort of, capturing of that.

And since we were a fairly undercapitalized business.

I really and didn't have, you know, a kind of a big ad staff.

I spent a long time focusing on how can you, how can you slice and dice

the, the, the inventory so that you can get as high and effective ad. Rate

as possible through, through third party or programmatic advertising when

it was definitely a secondary thing.

And, you know, it's sort of like the way that, you know, homesteaders, right?

You kill the animal and you, you harvest every bit of it kind of

thing.

so in that era, I had really kind of gotten that down to a science,

getting, getting a. An effective ad rate that wouldn't mean much

to corporate publications, but at our, at our, you know, low cost

level was, was, was really good.

go forward, you know, half a dozen years.

So as we got into direct advertising, we kind of.

Devalued, third party advertising.

but I still knew a lot about how to do it.

So as part of that pivot, we actually pivoted heavily again

in that same period when we were starting our subscription business.

We actually pivot, pivoted heavily towards, towards third party because I

knew there was, there was a lot of money we could, we could recapture there.

and we did, you know, using a lot of the same ideas and stuff, but

in the same way, but as I did that, and we dramatically increased our

revenue, from third party advertising.

So those were, you know, it was, it was very successful, but you

could see also the same trends.

That we're hitting in direct advertising, we're hitting in third party advertising.

and a lot of that is just, concentration, you know, really basic things,

Concentration of the companies that, that operated in that, in that space.

The, the related, you know, takeover of the social networks basically.

and Google being sort of a hybrid, being a sort of a hybrid part of that.

So, you know, there was a, I would say in, You know, 20 12, 20 13, we

had, started making a lot of money again in third party advertising, but

it was also clear that it was dying even as we were increasing the money

Explain that.

What did you, why?

Why,

Well, could see that again.

reduction of players in the space, the increasing dominance of the platforms.

and as you know, in the same way that, that when it, when it,

when it basically bubbled down to everything going through Google.

The effective prices were gonna go down.

We know about this, this is

basic monopolies and so forth, but I remember, I remember a conversation

with my colleague, Joe Rezo, who, who is the publisher of TPM now, but at the

time, who I basically hired in large part to manage third party in the way

that I, the way that I'm describing.

Probably in sometime in 2013 or 2014 or something like that.

What I said is, look, here's the way to think about this.

There are still, third party programmatic networks coming into

this space with lots of VC money.

They are gonna lose that money.

Maybe a few of them, you know, standard

hockey stick.

Maybe, maybe one or two of those will succeed, but all of that money

is going to be burned in what is basically a dying media space.

Because Google's gonna take all this over, and our job is to, is to

harvest indirectly as much of that VC

money as we can because you, you would, you

would

like cheap Uber rides to the airport.

Get

Get 'em.

Get 'em while they're, while you have

Exactly.

And frankly, you could see it because you know you You have, say your effective rate

is, you know, a a dollar 50 per ad slot.

Right.

And each few months you get some new entrant with a bunch of VC money

come in and they're offering too.

'cause they need to buy up space.

They need, you know, they need market share.

Great.

Yeah.

it on.

Right.

And,

Trust me, I spent those years at Digiday.

I mean, like we, I would stand up on that stage and be like, and thank you to our

partners, and then it would be like one slide of logos and then another slide of

logos, and then another slide of logos.

I was like, I kept joking.

I was like, the Matthew McConaughey, like I keep getting older with the logos.

Just keep changing, like, you know.

yeah, yeah.

And, and, and again, I, you know, we were in, in a lot of ways what we were, what

we were doing in that period was again.

Harvesting the VC money, trying to buy market share in a, in an industry

space that was being devoured by the big social networks and Google.

And, and look, I, I don't wanna, obviously, it's not

that I had perfect visibility

into this, at the time, but we had basic visibility, into it.

And, And again, that, that was, that was, why I was so desperate to grow,

the subscription business because I, I mean, I, I didn't, there was a,

you know, I, I don't know, in the.

Once you get to around the pandemic and just after, I mean, the fact that it, it,

it bottomed out quite as much as it did.

I didn't expect it, you know, I didn't expect quite that, but I could see

it was, I could see it was dying.

Because again, if you, if you, we were one of the, we were one

of the beta slash launch partners of what was you, you'll know GAM

Google Ad Manager.

Right?

The, the, the,

successor to double click.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The, well, this was, well that was before Google Ad Managers,

before they bought Double Click

and then Google.

Yeah.

So, GAM, Google, Google Ad Manager

was

hands on.

Yeah.

Was the, was the, yeah, exactly.

Well, when you, when you, when you need to, when you need to cover payroll,

you gotta be hands on, right?

so yeah, so, so GAM was first, and then in pretty short order, they bought

double click, and that's where, you know,

double click, you know, became the in-house version of it.

but if you had, if you had, been there from the beginning of it and watched

how it evolved and how their role.

It evolved and as the dominant role of it, you, you see it happening.

Right.

And I, I remember, I, I, I wrote occasionally.

I, I've obviously most of what I write about is politics, but occasionally

I've written about the business of media

I like those.

I'm like, I like the politics stuff, but I'm like, okay, this

guy's getting the details too.

I'm reading.

you know, it's funny, I, I, in a lot of ways, I, in some ways I've,

I've

people who come to TPM looking for politics and all

of a sudden they're in gam.

Well, well, you know, it's funny that, that I, I have always, in a lot of

ways I've enjoyed that stuff more because in the politics space, you know, I think

about, well, there's a million people who know what I'm saying about, you know,

there's just, but, but there, there are.

Along the way, there were certain things about, the the digital media

infrastructure that I certainly wasn't the only one who knew about, but often

I was in this, in this somewhat unique, sorry, grammarian, somewhat unique

space in that I really did know the details and I could write about it.

Right, that's the D Like there's a lot of people that

know the details, but they're

exactly, exactly.

There's a lot of people in the, in that space who,

They almost know too many of the details 'cause they're not able to like

sort of see the forest for the trees.

A lot of times, you know, they

you know, it.

it's a plumber's convention arguing about PVC piping and whatnot,

and it's like, wait a second.

You know, it's funny, I actually had, there was one time, I don't know,

it was probably, two or three years before the pandemic, something like that.

And, a couple of the guys who, were, you know, very, very high up

people in the Google, programmatic advertising, double click.

Hive, right.

Who worked out of the, worked out of their New York space, and were

actually both TPM subscribers.

So these were, you know, these were kind of TPM people.

And I had written, a few pieces basically explaining Google's mono monopoly

power over the advertising space.

We can say that now.

It's a

yeah.

Yeah.

Now it's, now it's, it's a formal

I used to always say dominant, like, like all these sort of

exactly.

it's a formal, formal legal finding now.

and again, you know, as monopolists go, there's, you know, some monopolists,

get in by just some kind of.

Nasty acquisitions.

Google did it to a great extent by a lot of forward thinking and, and, and

really pretty effective products and all that kind of stuff.

Anyway, so I

with the greatest like economic engine ever created

of

course,

search,

yes.

yes.

But, so anyway, so I, I had written a couple pieces saying, you know,

here's, here's how it works.

Here's how,

here's the big sort of picture of this and these two guys, very

nice guys, you know, subscribers to the site, readers of the site.

Basically invited me to come in.

'cause like, you know, we're not, we're not monopolists, you know, it's,

it's not, it's not what you think.

and so, so I went over to meet with them and it's funny, I actually had

this, you know how they do, you go into a place like Google, you have

to basically sign an NDA to sign

Oh yeah, you have to say you're not from North Korea and Cuba and stuff.

All just, you know, and I will never divulge

anything I see in this building

I'm like, I would always do this a report.

I'm like, you gotta be kidding me.

I was like, I'll sign this thing.

I'm not gonna be some, you know, guy who lights himself on fire in

the lobby, but I'm not, I'm, I'm not

Well, I was one of those guys, right?

Because, but not in this, but the reason was, is that, you know, I

think most people are going to Google because there's a business deal

on the line and they need to, and I remember I saw the thing and I

was like, I'm not signing this.

And she's, well, you have to.

And I, and

I said, I'm happy to leave.

Your guys invited me here.

Like, whatever.

Anyway, I got in.

So, but the, but the reason I bring this up is we had a great conversation.

They kind of, you know.

Whatever, but he talked about seeing the forest for the trees.

I don't think they thought they were a monopoly.

These were people who were admirers of the website,

you know, knew me through reading about politics.

I don't think they were trying to spin me like, why do they care?

They don't care.

You

But it, it effectively doesn't really matter.

Also like, you know, it doesn't, it's like I think about this a lot of times

in the political world of the sort of people who used to be more traditional,

I guess conservatives who are now like deconstructing the kabbala or whatever.

I'm like, it doesn't really matter if they truly believe it or not, like,

yeah.

No, no, no.

Yeah,

incentives.

The end

to totally.

But I, but I, but to your point that, A lot of the big trends,

and this applies to all of us.

It's hard for, it's hard for any of us to see the big trends that we are

governed by and and, and part of, right.

so yeah, so all of those things were, all of those things were coming together

and we were in a period sort of in the last, you know, three or four years

before the pandemic, when we were.

Trying to build the membership business as quickly as possible

to manage the, the, you know,

Yeah.

catastrophic decline of the advertising business.

And, and it was, you know, I don't need to tell anybody in, in the space

at the time it was very difficult, but we did have this advantage.

We'd, we'd gotten a four or five year jump on the subscription

thing, and that's what saved us.

Okay, so now tell me about where subscription slash memberships are.

I mean, they're the overwhelming majority of the revenue, right?

I mean, they're,

they're.

Yeah, in the nine, in the 90, in the 90%, range.

So basically it's an entirely a subscription business.

we, you know, we still do, programmatic advertising, but it's, it's, you

know, it's a minor part of the minor part of the revenue picture.

In practice, it is a completely subscription driven business,

And that gives you more.

revenue sources.

Right.

That gives you more stability, right?

I mean, you, you know, I know as someone who relies on indirect for the

most part, like it's really not great.

You go into the year starting from zero.

I mean, you have partners that will renew.

I'm like rubbing my neck right now 'cause I'm in like, sort of renewal season.

But, it's, it's definitely, there's a lot of advantages to.

it's night and it is just on the, just on the.

Quality of life front, frankly.

I, I mean we, you know, say back in any time between like, you know, 2010 and

2015, you know, go into the, go into the year with a, with a, with a budget.

Having to bring in upwards of $3 million.

Right.

and, that would, that was basically all advertising.

Now, programmatic is somewhat predictable, right?

You have a general sense since it's a commodity business, but

basically go into the year.

Not knowing where, you know, with the payroll there, it's

a payroll business, right?

It's overwhelmingly payroll

and, and rent.

and, and not knowing where the money is coming from.

And the difference is there is that if you are a bigger publication, you maybe don't

have guarantees, but you have advertisers.

They may advertise more or less, but you have advertisers, a small

publication without an endemic advertising space, which we are.

We're not tech where you've got ga, you know, gadget advertising and stuff like

that.

You have no advertisers.

You don't have advertisers.

You may have people who advertise more than in more than one year,

but you don't have advertisers.

So you're basically having to, to, build an advertising book.

From scratch each year, and that was so damn stressful.

I can't, I can't, I, I can't, I can't even describe because again, I wasn't,

I wasn't an ad seller per se, but I was the one running our strategy and,

and all the stuff, and, and the thing with subscriptions is, and this is, you

know, look, this is, we know this is why the, you know, Everybody wants you to

put down for recurring monthly payment.

It's like having an annuity or something like that, right?

I mean, you go into, when you're a subscription based business, you go

into the year basically having almost total certainty of nine, where 90% of

the revenues coming from, and that's, believe me, that is so different from 0%

Yeah.

of the revenue.

Yeah.

at the same time, right, like, I mean, there's, there's a lower ceiling.

I.

Yes, absolutely.

Abso there is a lower ceiling.

I think all of these, these shifts are, are very good.

If you think about like just the, the blogging era, you know, it was

going to be, it was in the, you know, content must be free time and

very few people were behind paywall.

Even doing a paywall was extraordinarily difficult.

Technically,

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

not used to paying online even, but much less for paying for content.

And they're also beyond, beyond pay, beyond the, the mechanics of a paywall,

even the mechanics of how you would.

Harvest subscription payments was,

was no stripe,

yeah.

There was no, and, and the, you know, the other part that's, that's, that is worth,

kind of making clear for people who, who weren't, you know, kind of in the mix at

this time, is that for most of what people consider like the blogging era, there was

no, there was no business model at all.

There were people asking for tips, at a certain point,

blog ads, which was a specific

company which really kind of pioneered,

um, the kind of Oh, yeah.

Oh yeah.

You know, that was a big part of the early, period for us, but I, I guess

it's, it's, it, it's important to realize that, again, this sort of what

people remember as the, as the height of

the blogging era

was no business model.

People didn't

think about it.

It was a hobbyist, it was CB radio, in many ways.

And then, you know, Nick Denton was sandbagging it all the time

saying, this is no business.

This is no business.

While he was building business,

Yeah.

He, you know, Nick always used to, I remember used, he always used to have

this line about anything, you know, in anything we do that, that, you know.

Might be called journalism.

You tell me and I'll get rid of it.

You know, Nick is a,

is a, a provocative and transgressive guy.

but yes, it was all, it was all without a business model.

And, and, you know, Henry Cope, Copeland had a big role in kind of making it,

opening up one, you know, one real revenue stream, which was a, which was a big deal.

So compare it to today where, you know, the energy, I think during the

pandemic particularly shifted to like Substack and I think Substack is a, you

know, it's an important company, right?

Like it far beyond, its like revenue and business itself.

In that it has created an entirely different, digital

economy for content that is.

Primarily direct payments from its audience.

Now

it doesn't only, there's Beehiiv, there's just sponsoring this podcast.

There's other places that you can do these, these things now.

But, you know, I think when I think of TPM, if it was going to

start 20 years later, it would probably start as a substack, right?

yeah, no, it absolutely, I mean, there's a lot of things like, you know.

Since we started doing a lot of things before, there were good

industry solutions for them.

We built a lot of things ourselves.

and so there are certain things that if you were starting now and you say, okay,

you know, we gotta 20% off the top for, you know, for the provider and all, you

know, all, all these kind of things, you know, we can't do that because we

already, we already own that money.

And so,

you know, when you're talk, when you're talking about, You

know, X millions of dollars of.

Revenue.

You, you can't really do that.

But yes, that would be, that would totally be the way that we do it.

We even have a couple of our newsletters, a semi on Substack.

They're still completely within the TPM ecosystem, but we also, do

versions of them on Substack to take some of their, you know, their finding

algorithms and stuff is a, a place to be.

So we even dabble with it, even though we don't, we don't, you know, all of our,

you know, kind of business fulfillment stuff is based on our own software.

You know, often built

on, on public libraries and stuff, but not, we don't, we don't

deal with any of the, any of the companies that will basically.

you know, provide a subscription, you know, the, the sort of

the, the, the back office of a subscription service as a, as, as,

a, as service to you.

But yeah, we absolutely would.

And, and, you know, the other part that's important to say is that the,

you know, the arrival of Substack is.

Partly because they have this great finding algorithm that allows people to,

you know, to find you and stuff like that.

And they've really, gotten the business fulfillment side

down really well at a relatively, you know, a relatively, easy percentage.

but the other flip side of it is everything we were just talking

about, about the collapse of digital journalism between like 2015 and 2020.

You've got lots of journalists who've decided that, it, it is the

preferable thing to, to, you know, put out their own shingle and be

like busking or not quite busking.

You know, there's everything from people who are just doing it kind of individually

to what, you know, the free press and, and some of the tech substack do.

but you know, it's, it, not everybody wants to do that.

So some of it is of necess.

I mean, a lot of it is of necessity,

Yeah, a lot of reluctant entrepreneurs out there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and that is, you know, it's funny, I remember there's

a, a New Yorker journalist.

I, I, I remember just a lunch we had, I don't know, a decade

ago or something like that.

And this is a very successful journalist, right?

Would be, you know, a very prominent and saying like, I don't know how you do it.

I just want a paycheck.

I don't wanna worry about all

that crap.

Right.

And, you know, people are character logically different, but the, but the,

the crisis in the industry, you know, forced a lot of character, logically

different people to say like, I, this

Well also the, the

is what I'm gonna do this.

the risk profile flipped almost, right?

Like, I mean, like it used to be it's higher risk to be like independent.

It absolutely like is in some ways.

But then like, do you wanna be sitting at CBS news right now?

I mean, that's pretty high risk.

They got, they got 2000 scalps.

They're gonna like take.

Yep,

so, you know, this industry has compressed quite a bit, but

like, tell me about like the sort of substack ification, if you will, of

politics, like in particular in your, in your space, because there are tons.

Now of independent voices, journalists, non journalists, comedians, I, you know,

I get most of my Middle East news from comedians, it seems like these days.

You know, comic Dave Smith tells me what's going on.

you know, there, there's, there's always been this, this, this pattern

that we have existed in with, with other players becoming more like us.

And I think that this was a lot of our, this was a big thing

that we dealt with, say between, you know, the, the 2000 6, 7, 8.

period to, you know, to a decade later that there was a certain point when the

big news organizations were still in some cases, still at once a day publication

or still operating totally in the, you know, kind of, high school journalism

class idea of what a newspaper article is.

And we could just kind of.

Run circles around those people.

And now we were still like a tiny little organization, but in the

sense of for people who wanted for news, for political news junkies who

wanted to know what was happening.

Now we had these formats that we worked in that we not, we obviously

weren't, you know, doing kind of, one publication a day, but able to,

customize our mode of publication.

To the content, sometimes two sentences is the news, and can you front two sentences

that you're not locked into an article?

this is look, an easy way of explaining this is the way that it is, that it is

totally natural to us now to know that the Times and the Post and all the other

similar organizations will have live blogs

of all sorts of, of moving stories.

That didn't used to be the case, and that's certainly not.

Just a matter of, of copying us, literally copying us, but a little,

you know, we started a, you know, we're, we're in the group of

publications that started those things.

So you have to, you have to get used to like, oh,

Yeah,

we're not the only ones doing

there's no moats.

There are

Yeah, exactly.

not a moat.

Like it's like, oh, that looks good.

I'm gonna do that.

Exactly, exactly.

so you have things like that and, and, so now we are.

We are in a space where a lot of, a lot of people who used to work for the big

publications are setting up shop, you know, places like, you know, the Bulwark

has a little different since their founding people were mainly people out

of politics as opposed to journalism.

But I, they've obviously hired up a lot of journalism now,

all sorts of places like this.

So, so there are a lot of, you know, we are not that unique as a, as an

organization of around 20 people.

You know, doing this stuff.

And that's, you know, that's how media works and that's great as far as I'm

concerned because we have, we have an audience that likes what we do.

And I can honestly say that, that, that our business is more, robust

and stable than it's ever been.

not just, you know, so not just surviving as you say.

It's not, we're not gonna have hockey stick growth.

Right.

This is the size of the business.

but a lot of the people who had hockey stick growth didn't realize that they

weren't actually having hockey stick

growth.

It was kind of an illusion, and there were very specific reasons

why, why we did not get in on that very aggressive, VC backed period.

It was a decision I made.

not, and not one 'cause like, oh, you know, journalism needs to remain pure.

I, there, there was, there was, you know, TPM was a hot thing

at the time when that money was flooding in.

And, at a certain point I was, it wasn't even a matter of, I had to be persuaded.

I was so.

I was so busy running things that I actually had a number of sort of prominent

Silicon Valley VCs trying to get in touch with me and that other people that I just,

I can't even explain to myself, now, like, why didn't I respond to these people?

And it

Well, you could just say that you were wise.

You know, well,

I got wise a little later at that, at, at that point, I wasn't wise though.

I was just, I was just so, I was just so full on doing it.

day after day.

In any case, what happened was eventually I got persuaded like,

all right, you should do, you take some investment money, whatever.

And one of the things I've always been very happy about

is that I, as I was, as I was.

Walking through how these deals would work and stuff, I realized very

quickly all the ways that you can lose control of a company while still

being the majority owner of a company.

And for reasons that are just characterological, I

could never accept that.

I couldn't handle the idea that someone could, could take the company

away from me.

and it's, it's, it's kind of like hard to like.

Looking back, but I mean, that was the sort of default for a lot

of people who reached like, you know, the, you, you, you, like you

said, you were like a hot property.

Whereas I feel like now it's normalized, you know, bootstrapping

is the assumption in media.

Like,

I don't think nobody's like out there like raising money for the most part,

Yeah.

Why would you?

sites.

It's like, get to.

You know, particularly you, you can do, and you look at like, I think particularly

in the political landscape, like there's some really profitable, like small

and particularly around personalities.

Now they don't have a ton of, of enterprise value, right?

But like amazing businesses.

for you in the, if you're, if you're running it, it's, it's,

I, look, I've been, I've been, you know, in, in incredibly fortunate

with, with, with TPM, it's great.

It's, it's, it's doing well.

You know, I did a, we, we have this, We are publishing this 25th

anniversary series where we basically went to 25 people in every kind of

part of the digital media history in present and just say, what's, what's

an essay about the hist, about the last 25 years of digital media that

you're sort of itching to write?

And we commissioned all those, and

I wrote an introduction for it and the sort of the after sort of thanking

everybody and all that kind of stuff.

I said the, the, the, the original sin of digital media.

there are many since I read it, but

Well, okay.

Yeah.

Well, there's, this is the, the, the, the core one in

my Yeah, you're absolutely right.

There is, there is one is that people thought digital media was part of the tech

industry.

That it was, that it was tech and it was not.

and when you talk about moats, you know, this is, this is, this is very basic

for anybody who, who knows, Silicon Valley or VCs or tech world, you, know,

you, you, you you intentionally blow a lot of money fast because you're trying

to build scale and network effects and lock in and you know, let alone losing

nine out of 10, you can lose 19 out of 20 and you get locked in, you are

gonna make all your money back.

That's the whole game.

And there was this weird.

inability to see that there, there are no network effects in news.

There are certain,

certain little parts of news distribution that have network effects, but

publications have no network effects.

You're not gonna be the stripe of news and suddenly like, wow,

I, you know, it's so big now.

You can't not get your news from Stripe.

That makes no sense and a huge, huge amount of, of, of everything that

happened and the whole collapse was, was that playing out and you had, you

know, added to the fact that the whole, the whole, the whole business model

was sort of destroyed by the, by the, you know, concentration of, of the.

Of the tech you know, platform monopolies.

but that's another thing that again, sort of allowed us some

visibility is that if you were running a media business, and, and

had a really hands-on sense of how the money worked, you could see that

all of these hotshot publications of a decade ago were not making money.

You just, you, you know the space.

You look at, you look at the numbers and you say like, you're, obviously, you,

you're, you're telling, you know, you're not gonna fool Morrissey, but you're

gonna fool half the other people in the media press that you're, that you're

making money, you're not making money.

You know, you may have some sort of Wall Street creative,

creative accounting and stuff.

Community adjusted ebitda.

Yeah, all these kind, you know, it's funny, I was telling something recently.

They talk about, you know, the, the fact that you're in a space where

there's a difference between are you solvent and are you cash flow positive?

You're not, you know, I, for those listeners, I know, I know accounting,

I know the difference.

But in practice, in this business where there is no, inventory, where

there is, there is very little, intellectual property that, that,

that can, can be done anything with.

if you are not cashflow positive, you are, there's someone who's

fooling you about your job security.

So let me, let me ask you this then the final topic, but it's a

little bit like broad, but I have this theory about like, we're operating

in the information space, right?

And it's, there's, the media industry is, is a small part of a larger.

Space in which everyone's jostling for attention,

Mm-hmm.

and people have different business models Talking point talking points.

USA to me or talking points, what am I saying?

Turning point USA was was a media organization

Mm-hmm.

purpose about it.

And we have that.

All across this information space.

a lot of the energy seems to be in personalities, in creators, like,

and there's no moat really in media.

I think we've gone through this at this point.

and so I think you end up.

Defaulting to personality because you know, you have different,

different personalities and you can develop a parasocial bond.

And we've seen that, within the, the, the contours of the information

space that, that is rewarded.

Is this do, first of all, how do you, we evaluate that and then is,

is that like a permanent condition as we move beyond mass media?

Right.

It's a good question.

I, I, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're catching me before

I say I, I knew everything in retrospect because I, I don't have a,

I don't have a clear sense of that.

You know, I, I think if we look at, if we, well, let's look.

There is.

We have a lot of things that have happened just in the last six months.

That point to a, a lot of media concentration that is, that is,

you know, kind of tied to the government and stuff like that.

So there may be forms of lock in there that we're, that we're already seeing.

I think that, I, I could see us being in this space, the sort of the influencer

personal connection space for a long time.

I think if we look at the broad scope of history that you, you, society

and economies, work their way into somewhat stable, institutionally stable

moments, but we're certainly not.

we're not there yet.

it could also be, you know, it, it could be something that our society is still,

you know, it could be something about the internet, the sort of the parasocial

intimacy that is, that is, Seems to go naturally with the internet that maybe

you are going to have something.

I will, I will say this, that, you know, we're all talking

about, how AI will affect media.

Will, you know, will, will, will, dis intermediate

journalists and stuff like that.

And I do think that there's, there's a pretty big contradiction here because

the entire coin of the realm about.

Influencers and parasocial relationships is about a person.

It's about a person.

that is, I do you, you can fool someone.

You know, you could, you could, you could have a,

an influencer using AI to, to produce their stuff.

but this is something that I have, I've given a lot of thought to,

partly because I'm in this business.

I doubt just generationally whether, whether it'll affect me a lot

personally, but like, you know, will, will serious news coverage

and let me amend that a little bit.

Very straightforward wire stuff I could see being done by ai

and, and that's very important stuff.

It just, it's different, it's very kind of specific and factual, but,

people doing opinion journalism.

What it means.

Connecting the dots.

Yeah.

think there was a lot about the era of major metropolitan

newspapers that we did not understand until the internet destroyed.

And I think there is something similar about the re potential relationship

between AI and journalism, and I think the key is that even though

we haven't had to think about it, if you read opinion pieces, it is only

relevant or compelling to you because the idea that a another person.

An entity like fundamentally, like you, a human being,

came up with these ideas and wrestled with them.

If it is by a machine, I don't think the vast majority of people

will be interested to read it.

That's not to say that AI couldn't fool a lot of people or fool some

people into thinking a person did it.

But the idea.

I think people only want to read that kind of journalism if it

originates with a human being.

so, and I, I,

Yeah.

And that, that would argue that this would accelerate and would be something of emo

like that would be because like the, the.

Just the humanity of it would then be the differentiator.

And you can't give up your differentiator.

And that's why I sort of, you know, I think, look, there's a lot of pressure on

the news industry to get more efficient

and AI is a

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

et cetera.

at the same

time, you can't give up like your, your strength.

And maybe this is me sort of whistling by the

No, I, I, I think, I think that is true.

I mean, I was thinking of moats in different ways.

There's, there's, there's moats for the influencer era,

and I think there is a moat there.

the, the, the, the moat for individual companies, that's

different because obviously individual influencers, come and go.

But no, I, I, I do think, I do think that is the case.

I think people want to hear what another person, thinks.

And the more creative that person is, the more whatever, the more kind of attractive

they are as someone, as someone to read.

But I think even for listeners, think about yourself.

Think about if you, if wherever you read your opinion, journalism,

if it's, you know, the Time's Up ed page or, or your favorite site.

If you read something knowing that it was something produced by an algorithm,

you know, produced by ai, would you be interested in what it had to say?

And I don't think most people would.

So I do think that is,

Yeah, I think the big, the big unknown is, and we could

go on this forever, we could do one of those four hour podcasts.

I think the big unknown is whether that generationally changes,

like we're too far into it.

Like we grew up like analog.

I mean, all, all the internet stuff is

My, my, my bet is that it doesn't, that it is something that

is something actually fundamental to, to, to why we read, why we

consume, why we consume things.

But yeah, we,

Well that's assuming people are gonna be reading.

Well, why you consume, why you, why you consume well, why you

read, why you listen to podcasts.

You

know, podcasts is another example.

You could, obviously, you could, you could certainly engineer

a podcast with, with ai.

Would you want to hear it?

But it's also true that would, it's very hard for us to, to, for

any humans to think beyond their generational, you know, beyond

their generation, beyond their time.

Okay.

Awesome.

Thank you so much, Josh.

This was, uh, really great.

Congrats

really appreciate it.

I had a great time.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.