The Growth of Talking Points Memo and Independent Media

The following is adapted
from the keynote speech by Talking Points Memoblogger/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.
This week a special prosecutor was appointed to investigate whether
Gonzales and other Bush officials should face criminal charges in connection
with the firings.

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 free-lancer, 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, $6,000 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 $6,000
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 fulltime 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 $6,000 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.

Coming off the 2006 election,
there was no way to effectively support the original reporting we wanted
to do without being a full-service news site. We now have an AP wire.
On our front page we want to have all of the stories - even if not
stories we've reported - put together so you could, if you're
interested in serious national and political news, find it all at TPM
or find a portal to it. This is a for-profit company. To have the kind
of advertising revenues you need to have six fulltime reporters, you
can't just have two or three stories that you're following. That's
never going to make you a destination site for news.

Our final aim is to do original
reporting on stories that are either not getting attention or not getting
the kind of sustained attention we think they should be. It's borne
fruit in things like the U.S attorney firings story. Before that became
a big story, we had it all to ourselves. We had every break there was.
Besides luck, there are two or three reasons we got the story and others
missed it. One is that I'd spent a lot of time covering the Duke Cunningham
bribery story back in 2005 and 2006. And then I hired muckraker reporters
to continue that. We knew that case inside out. When the U.S attorney
who was prosecuting that case got fired while she was prosecuting that
case, I remember where I was. I remember thinking, "Wow, there's
absolutely no way that that's legit. Something happened." Because
U.S attorneys are never fired, and the reality is that the U.S attorney
prosecuting a congressman of the president's party could be drunk,
a drug addict - untouchable, absolutely untouchable.

Another part of it: when we
started, we had our readers who sent in - the firings were public,
most of them, they were just reported locally. So it wasn't in one
place. The particular advantage that our readers gave us was a really
big deal. And I'd seen enough up to that point - when their argument
was that through a random coincidental set of facts that they happened
to fire 8 U.S attorneys - that made me more persistent. So it's
a matter of stories we were covering, a very deep level of skepticism
we had about the people we were covering, and the neat advantages of
our relationship with our readers.

At the point at which it really
broke into a major news scandal, the New York
Times and Washington Post could each throw half a dozen reporters
at it that have years of experience and more resources and probably
better sources. So we constantly face this - I'm not sure "ironic"
is the right word - when we've been ahead on a story: The point
at which we succeed, we also lose the story. When half a dozen
major news organizations throw their resources at a story, it's very
hard for my two investigative reporters to make much headway.

Balance vs. Accuracy

There are a number of reasons
why it's important that there be an alternative media, not a media
culled by a handful of major corporations. The one I want to focus on
is the way that the mainstream media consistently and, as part of the
ethos, prioritizes balance over accuracy in reporting the news - particularly
political and campaign news. The way that John McCain has had a series
of specious commercials and campaign events in which either he or his
running-mate say things that aren't spin or stretching the truth,
but by any conventional English-language definition: lies, things that
are false and are said knowing that they are false. Until the last few
days, the headline would be: Lots of lying in campaigns, everybody's
sad about it.

There's a lot of reasons
why that is a flawed conception of journalism. It's not a personal
fault of the journalists in question - that's the model they're
trained to operate in. As the concept of journalistic objectivity has
evolved, it's become a corrupt model of journalism, rooted in the
economic changes of business in journalism over the last half-century.
Earlier in the last century, you had a medium-sized city like Pittsburgh
or Louisville or Phoenix, the model of those newspapers was not
that they would serve an entire community.

But then there is CNN's model:
Everybody should be watching CNN, everybody. If that is your model,
if you are the single newspaper in San Francisco or Kansas City or St.
Louis, you are just highly constrained about how rigorous you can be
in the accuracy of your reporting. Because the whole model is: You are
appealing to everybody. With the conglomeration of media - not just
the major corporations nationally, but even at the regional and city
level-you have single news organizations that have something close
to a monopoly. It creates a great deal of pressure to embrace
that flawed model of journalism.

One of the things that is most
important about independent media is that you have news organizations
not part of the model where they ideally want to be everybody's dominant
news source. If that's not the case, you don't have that need to
satisfy everybody -- and that underlying need to prioritize balance
over accuracy.

That's why the existence
of an independent media sector is so important. Also, the more voices
you have, the more takes on the news, you're just going to have a
more vibrant and diverse news ecosystem - as opposed to having two
or three gatekeepers that control the news.

Media Future

As for the future of independent
media, whenever you have new technologies, you always have a great deal
of turnover and creation of new models. We are definitely in a period
of what a great economist called "creative destruction" in the journalism
profession - right now with an emphasis on destruction. A lot of newspapers
will just go out of existence.

At the same time, you have
a lot of what we do and web-native news organizations. The question
in my mind: Are we just in a period of tumult and we'll settle down
and have the same kind of dominant entities - or is there something
about the technology that has created a permanent ingrained ease of
entry into the space? I think the latter is the case. The way TPM came
into existence -- without any concept that it would be a company with
multiple employees - simply wouldn't have been possible in any technological
universe before the one that existed in the last ten years.

So I think there are reasons
why the kind of dominance that existed earlier in the century of newspapers
won't be possible in the future. As long as the Internet itself -
the structure of the Internet - remains the same. That's why issues
like Net Neutrality are so important, with the Internet structured in
a way that new players have that ease of entry.

One final point: A lot of people
think of independent media as being synonymous with nonprofit media
-- either intentionally nonprofit or accidentally nonprofit. But nonprofits
get their money from somewhere, from foundations; now those foundations
tend to have a much more benign set of "asks" of the organizations
they support than advertisers do. But it still limits independence.

In my experience, and I get
criticized for saying this sometimes, at the [nonprofit] magazine that
I worked for before I started TPM, the fact that our continued existence
was not based on size or interest level of our readership allowed us
to be cut off and not particularly in touch with what our readership
had a fine interest in. I think that was not just bad in business terms,
but much more importantly, bad in journalistic terms.

I actually think that for the
independent media sector to be independent and vital in a deep way,
it needs to be not only rooted in the nonprofit sector, but again, in
for-profit terms.