Picture this: The 2000 recount is underway and a friend told you about a website named Talking Points Memo, where a blogger named Joshua Micah Marshall is yelling into the void about George W. Bush stealing the presidency before the nation's eyes. You check it out on your desktop computer, waiting for the dial-up to load the narrow ribbon of text on a bright-blue webpage.

Fast forward 25 years and you're probably reading this newsletter on your cell, bleary-eyed from hours of screentime and scrolling Bluesky to keep tabs on the Trump administration's latest depravities. 

So much has changed about our news ecosystem in the quarter century since Josh launched TPM. Blogging exploded as a legitimate form of journalism; outlets surfed easy clickbait Facebook traffic; publications pivoted to video and back more times than we can count; and tech billionaires snatched up outlets and tweaked algorithms, transforming how we all access information and fracturing our shared reality.

For our anniversary, we wanted to take a beat to celebrate making it 25 years in this unpredictable industry. So we asked 25 writers we admire — from Gawker co-founder Elizabeth Spiers and former WIRED editor in chief Megan Greenwell to Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara and Semafor columnist Dave Weigel — to reflect on a notable moment in the past 25 years of digital media for our new series Pivots, Trolls and Blog Rolls, rolling out now through mid-November. You can find a selection of those essays below. 

Thanks to our loyal readers for staying with us all these years, and to new ones for joining us. We couldn't do it without you.

– Allegra Kirkland

To celebrate 25 years publishing thanks to our members, we're taking $25 dollars off the annual price of any TPM membership