Talking Points Memo

November 13 will mark Talking Points Memo's 25th anniversary. Thanks to the Internet Archive, you can actually see Josh Marshall's first ever post here as it appeared two-and-half decades ago. As you scroll down to that first entry (remember everything being reverse chronological?) you may be hit by a wave of nostalgia, perhaps a pang of longing for the internet as it used to be.

As one of the very first digitally native news sites, TPM has been around for virtually every era of online publishing. And with some foresight and some fortune, we've weathered many storms and are proud to say we're stronger now than ever. One of the ways we've chosen to celebrate the occasion is to publish a series of 25 essays by 25 prominent journalists about the history of digital media. Each essay examines an important moment or idea that helps understand the last 25 years of our industry.

We dubbed the series Pivots, Trolls, & Blog Rolls, which is itself a pithy encapsulation of things. Josh Marshall wrote the introduction: The Original Sin of Digital Media Was the Belief That Digital Journalists Were Part of the Tech Business.

We've published five essays so far and the authors are likely familiar. Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker, examines What Made Blogging Different? Nathan Robinson, founder, publisher, and editor of Current Affairs, tells us Why I Founded a Print Magazine At the Peak of Digital Media Mania. Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin and president of The Nation, asks Can Substack Recover the Blogosphere We Lost? David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect, discusses how DC's Access Journalists Turned the News Into a Luxury Good. Max Rivlin-Nader, co-publisher of Hell Gate, writes that The Future of Local News Is Making People Pay For It. The rest of the pieces will be rolling out through our anniversary week, so stay tuned for more.

As Josh's intro explains, many of the digital media sites that have come and gone, or maybe continue to exist in zombie form, suffered from a kind of identity crisis. They were run like tech companies with tech company expectations. We've always known at TPM that we are a journalism business. We report the news, we provide analysis, and we curate what's important. We've worked hard to avoid the pitfalls in Dayen's essay — the news can't become a luxury good only for the well-off — while acknowledging the reality of Rivlin-Nader's piece: revenue from readers is the path to long-term sustainability.

Whether you've been reading for 25 years, 25 weeks or 25 hours, we'd appreciate your support as a member. We'll never lose sight of what we do: Journalism.