Talking Points Memo

If you've been reading TPM for awhile, you may already know that our organization can shift on a dime. We typically have around five reporters. (A few of our editors also write.) That means, unlike larger news organizations, we don't have people with particular beats. We don't have people who author a particular kind of story — no one who just writes breaking news or just writes features or just does a newsletter or a podcast. Everyone, at any moment, can pitch in with anything on any topic. 

Though it wasn't always the result of a conscious decision on the part of the editors, TPM has made use of this flexibility during this unprecedented time. We've reinvented our approach to the news repeatedly since August 2024, when our last Journalism Fund drive concluded, with our reporters working in different modes and in different styles across a wide range of topics to contend with a historic moment in American history.

As we reflect on the many ways TPM is unique during the journalism fund drive, I thought readers might enjoy a glimpse of how we see the journey we've traveled over the last year — in terms of what we understood ourselves to be providing to readers, and what we understood readers to need from us

Ahead of the election, we felt it was important to make clear the stakes. That meant less horserace-style journalism and more about what the Trump administration was making clear it intended to do. We warned about the coming attempt at denaturalizations, of military crackdowns against protesters, and of a Republican effort to lay the groundwork for claiming undocumented immigrants stole the election — a conspiracy theory the GOP didn't end up needing to make use of, given their comfortable margins in each swing state. We didn't totally eschew breaking news either — we, for instance, did exclusive reporting on the Trump campaign's anti-Haitian attacks on residents of Springfield, Ohio and chronicled such daily occurrences as QAnon memes posted by Trump — but our focus was on making clear the ways in which we could already see Trump II would not simply be a repeat of Trump I. 

With Trump's November 2024 win, our understanding of what readers needed changed entirely. No one needed to know what could happen. It was happening. And it was happening extraordinarily quickly. We shifted to be an organization focused less on analysis, more on breaking news. We broke stories on the extremists and ideologues streaming into government; DOGE's attacks on the IRS, independent agencies and the courts; and Trump's flouting of Supreme Court precedent with waves of illegal firings. We chronicled individual developments as Congress and the Supreme Court acquiesced to Trump's efforts to elevate the executive branch over the others; Republicans' telegraphed (and ultimately realized) plan to cut health care after promising not to; and the administration shipped immigrants without due process to countries with which they had no connection. 

Now, another shift in how we approach our coverage is underway. Around May, we started to get the sense readers might be overwhelmed with the rapid-fire drumbeat of headlines. We can't blame them. DOGE, Trump's firings, the Supreme Court's carveouts for the administration on the shadow docket, the abuse of the immigration system, Congress' giveaway of its own power, the scandals du jour — there was a lot going on each day, and it was nearly impossible to keep track of it all. We haven't stopped trying to, but we've also made room, again, for pieces that step back and contextualize this moment — not warnings of the type we were publishing in late 2024, per se, but stories taking note that many of those things we warned about are now coming to pass — helping readers not to miss the forest for the trees. Many of our most-read stories capture moments that, in a way, are the tip of the iceberg. They describe something small that is indicative of something big, like JD Vance's speech to a right-wing think tank outlining his thoughts on who has "claim over America," or the ways in which the administration might spend Congress' dump truck of money for Trump's immigration policies, or the DeSantis administration's use of disaster preparedness resources for its new, performatively cruel immigrant detention camp. Each is a narrow story that speaks to a broader theme. 

When you support TPM, you are supporting a news organization that is small, but nimble. We can't cover everything. (Increasingly, nobody can.) But each day, we remain committed to providing readers with stories that can help them understand what's happening in a way that, we hope, meets their current need for information, satisfies their curiosity, and helps ground them in our member community. Over time, what readers need might change. But we pride ourselves on our ability to intuit, and adapt to, those changes.

- John Light (Executive Editor)