Talking Points Memo

A few years ago, a study was published in the journal Work, Aging and Retirement that investigated the relationship between employees' age and tenure and organizational performance. Here's what the authors had to say about their findings:

Our findings were clear: Employee age had no impact on business performance, whether performance is measured by financial, operational, or customer outcomes. Tenure, however, had a significant positive and sometimes very sizeable impact on financial performance and operational excellence.
 

Now, you may have some general impressions about the digital news business, or the kind of people who tend to work in it. One of the things you might have heard is that it is the province of people in their 20s and 30s, and Millennials and Gen Z love jumping from job to job. Another thing you might have heard is that the journalism industry has experienced a massive number of layoffs in recent years. Or perhaps you've heard that journalists are struggling from intense burnout.
 

TPM is mostly made of Millennials with some Gen X stragglers, yet in the last decade or so we've been remarkably stable. The median tenure of a TPM employee is 7 years, which actually understates things because we currently have two people on staff who left and then came back. 
 

My point here is that there are a lot of reasons why TPM is good but one of them is our experience working together. One of the things the Work, Aging and Retirement study I referenced above gets into is, while there is discipline-specific knowledge and excellence, there is also "firm-specific" knowledge — in other words, not only do we know journalism and publishing, but we know how these things work at TPM. That allows us to be more efficient, more accurate, more interesting. 

Now, of course, there are benefits to infusions of new energy and ideas from the outside. That's one of the reasons we're currently looking to add two new people to the team. It's why we're (most likely) starting our internship program soon. It's why we want to build out a robust freelance operation. But these growth paths complement our core strength, which is years and years of working together and getting very good at doing what it is TPM

One of the many challenges of the news business is balancing the need for revenue to pay people, and to exist generally, with the moral imperative to distribute important information as widely as possible. Most journalists — but not all — get into this line of work because they are passionate about the craft and they want their work to be read by as many people as possible, which would mean the work has a significant impact.

However, this creates a natural tension. Most trusted news outlets cannot sustain on advertising revenue alone. Even before the internet, you paid for a newspaper or you paid for cable. But if you have to pay for quality news — emphasis on quality, there's a lot of free stuff out there — that risks creating a bifurcated society where only the affluent have access to the news. 
 

At TPM, we want to be part of the solution, not the problem. Fortunately, we've hit on an innovative and elegant solution to this problem: If you can't afford a membership, you can get one for free. These free memberships come in two flavors: Student memberships and community-supported memberships. We've given away thousands of these memberships over the years. 
 

We're able to provide these memberships thanks to two s a stable revenue stream that allows us to plan ahead financially into the future. Second, The TPM Journalism Fund. This was created to give  readers who want to give even more than the cost of a membership the opportunity to support the growth of our journalism team — and help fund free memberships, hence the phrase "community-supported."
 

When you become a member at TPM you aren't just supporting TPM, you're helping to sustain the journalism ecosystem more broadly. We hope you'll consider becoming a part of the community.

Sometimes when I'm bored I will just go to the Wikipedia page for whatever day it is and see what was going on in the past, on today's date. Eventually what you realize if you hadn't reasoned it out ahead of time is: every single day is packed with insanely important events, which makes sense because there are only 365 days and humans have been around for 200,000 years. And we have recorded history going back many thousands of years. A random sampling of April 8th events:

• 217 – Roman emperor Caracalla is assassinated
• 1232 – The Mongols begin their siege on Kaifeng, the capital of the Jin dynasty
• 1605  – Mary Stuart is born. Wikipedia says her "birth was much anticipated." Her death a mere two years later due to complications from pneumonia, was not
• 1820 – The Venus de Milo, which I have seen in person, is discovered on the Aegean island of Milos
• 1859 – Edmund Husserl, philosopher who established the school of phenomenology, is born
• 1959: Grace Hopper leads a group of people who develop the computer programming language we know today as COBOL and which Musk and DOGE seem to not understand
• 1974 — Hank Aaron hits his 715th home run, passing Babe Ruth to become the all-time leader
• 1987 – Elton John, the Trinidadian footballer, NOT the world renown musician, is born
• 2013: The Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, dies
• 2024: A total solar eclipse is visible across much of North America. This was literally last year and I already forgot about it
   

What is my point here? Well I guess part of my point is that I had a dead period around 3 p.m. and so this is what I was doing. But my real point is: A lot of stuff happens every single day! How do you know if you are catching the most important stuff? It's tough in 2025 when there's social media spewing nonsense and politicians making stuff up and your neighbors saying they heard X about Y from Z. That's why at TPM, we're not only transparent, but we emphasize and take pride in not trying to cover everything. We say it explicitly in the Morning Memo but it also is an ethos that runs through our entire org: A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo.
 

Paradoxically, though time is finite, the number of things happening at any given time can feel infinite, and infinity is pretty scary. But that is why we're here, to sort through infinity and give you the most important stuff you need to make decisions about your life and win some arguments with the noobs you encounter when picking your kids up from school. So make April 8th the day you join TPM.

As TPM's 25th year rolls on, we're rolling out to Chicago. We hope you'll join us as we continue to celebrate this milestone while also taking a sober look at the political landscape in which we find ourselves.

On May 14th, we'll be nearly four months into Trump II. A lot has happened so far, to put it mildly. Josh & Kate will discuss some of the most consequential and important developments to date.

After the show there will be a brief audience Q&A, followed by a cocktail hour where some other TPM staffers will be around to chat. All attendees receive one complimentary cocktail.

Capacity is limited so please get your tickets as soon as possible if interested. 

Date 

May 14th, 2025

Time 

Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

Pod begins at 7 p.m. with a brief audience Q&A to follow

Cocktail hour following the Q&A until 10 p.m.

Location 

The Clybourn at iO Theater

1501 North Kingsbury Street, Chicago, Illinois

Ticket Information

Free for Inside members

$50 for Prime and Ad-Free members 

$75 for non-members

All attendees receive one complimentary cocktail

Here's a peek behind the proverbial TPM curtain. 
 

One of our great struggles is getting Josh to say "membership" instead of "subscription." You may have noticed he uses both interchangeably. Now, I can see how you may think, "honestly, who cares?" And that is a valid question. Ultimately, I'm not sure it matters much in business terms. Hell, it might not matter in any terms. But just in case you are one of the people who has picked up on this intra-TPM tension, here's why we care.
 

There is not one way to do journalism. There is not one way to run a successful media organization. However, we think good journalism involves serving the community and serving a community means forming real relationships with the people within that community. In the days when newspapers had geographic monopolies and there were very few national news outlets, serving the community was fairly straightforward. Everyone lived in generally the same area, had the same local government, attended the same schools, rooted for the same sports teams. 
 

TPM is not a local news outlet, but we still think it's important to get to know our community — our readers and listeners. It's why we'll always have some kind of community forum for our readers to engage with each other. It's why reader emails have always been a key component of the Editors' Blog. It's why we host happy hours that our members can attend for free. It's why in May we're going to be hosting a live podcast in Chicago. It's why in September we'll host yet another live show in another yet-to-be-determined city. It's why we periodically host focus groups, conducted by our own staff, to better understand our members and how we can serve them.
 

A "subscription" is a transactional relationship. Give us the cash, we'll get you the goods. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with subscriptions. I have many of them. It's just not what we're doing here at TPM. When you join TPM (the preferred phrasing we struggle to get Josh to use with regularity), it's more than a quid pro quo. We want to form real relationships so that we can help you better understand the world. That's what we're passionate about and it's what we enjoy doing. 

So anyway, the membership drive is technically over but here's another crack at joining TPM for 25 percent off. Hope to see you at an event soon. Or maybe just in our inbox. Whatever works.