Echos from the blogosphere: TPM’s Josh Marshall on blogs, newsletters, and independent journalism's resurgence

Traditional journalism has experienced several major disruptions over the past 25 or so years — as we’ve seen with the recent Washington Post layoffs — but independent journalism is currently seeing major growth. This is reminiscent, in some ways, of what we saw 20 years ago when little-known writers started making names for themselves in the world of blogging.

Josh Marshall, the founder of Talking Points Memo, was a well-known blogger in the 2000s. Since then, TPM has become something of a household name amongst readers.

Marshall started TPM as a personal blog in 2000. It launched while the U.S. presidential election that year was still up in the air — thanks to Florida’s count being hotly contested. Marshall covered that political mess and then went on to cover many Bush administration scandals.

His blog grew into a full-fledged political news publication later that decade, and it switched from an advertising business model to a subscription model in 2012. “One of the reasons TPM still exists is that we started a subscription program years ahead of everyone else,” Marshall says.

Marshall tells Depth Perception that he finds a lot of the things happening in independent journalism exciting, and he’s hoping that what’s being built now will be sustainable and help the industry flourish as a whole. —Thor Benson

You’ve witnessed the rise of independent journalism in recent years, and I’m sure you’ve seen the good and the bad of it. What are some standout examples to you of journalists or new outlets that seem to be on the right track?

Well, I think I’d put The Bulwark in that category. Are you familiar with Bolts Mag? Yeah, I think what they are doing is a good example. I think Defector is a good example. I mean, I could come up with a bunch more. Then there’s all the independents, which in some ways are an even bigger story.

It’s a funny thing, because for most of our history when we would think of competitor publications, they were usually much larger than us. Orders of magnitude larger than we were. The business models were very distinct. When we thought of peer publications, it was the same thing.

Now, in the last five or six years, there are lots of publications that are pretty similar in business terms. Pretty similar to what we do. You have anywhere from a handful of [employees] up to mid-double digits, subscription-based. It’s a funny thing. It’s a new and kind of gratifying thing for us.

Our model obviously has changed quite a lot over the history of TPM, and there was an early period when there was no business model. But for a long time, we were advertising-based and then we transitioned over a number of years to subscriptions. That was obviously a big, big change.

Who are some specific independent journalists you appreciate?

There’s so many. I subscribe to so many of them. Brian Beutler. He has Off Message. There’s Chris Geidner’s Substack. Everyone making a go of it on a Substack, or not a Substack. I’m all for Substacks. It makes me a little uncomfortable if any platform, even if it’s a relatively benign platform, has so much of the play. That feels like an element of dependence to me.

But they’ve made this possible to a great extent. We have one of our newsletters on Substack, in addition to our [owned-and-operated] ecosystem. We’ve worked at it for a long time. We have the capacity to do a lot of this stuff in-house. We have our own sort of membership platform and authentication platform. Not everyone can do that. It’s very, very hard to do that without a Substack-type thing.

I feel like it’s been an interesting trajectory over the past 20 years where a lot of big name journalists today were bloggers in the 2000s, then they went to legacy media or big new media companies, and now a lot of them are doing newsletters. What do you think are the similarities and differences between the blogging days and this newsletter situation?

Well, with a few exceptions, the sort of big, early bloggers were people who had either no or little experience in conventional journalism before they started. Everyone was a newcomer. Andrew Sullivan was a significant exception to that. Whereas now you have people who are former CNN anchors, right?

The other big thing is that there was really no business model in what people think of as the heyday of independent blogging. There was no way to make money from it. You could make trivial amounts of money with tip jars and stuff like that, [but] there was no business model until like 2003 or so. So that is very different.

There really were little or no platforms to do it on. For the first two-and-a-half or three years that I did TPM, I hand-coded each post individually. I wrote them in an HTML page, right? I wasn’t operating with a [content management system]. When I was in graduate school, I was designing websites. So there was a technical hurdle that you had to deal with. There are so many ways now, on so many different platforms, where we can just start doing stuff.

Another huge one is that everything that is happening now is happening in one sense or another in the social media ecosystem. All of these operations are really premised on social media as a way to get out the word that they exist. That’s a huge difference.

One other thing is that there was simply no acculturation that you would subscribe to something online. It took a long time for that to become a thing, and that was sort of what we were dealing with in 2012, 2013, and 2014 — just kind of getting people to think in those terms. One of the reasons TPM still exists is that we started a subscription program years ahead of everyone else. When [journalism] really started to fall apart in the late teens, we had already been building this for five or six years.

Bloggers changed the world. Can newsletter journalists do it again?

In Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet, Garrett Graff tells the story of how the web, a technology with the power to fuel democracy became a weapon aimed at the very heart of it. But it wasn’t always this way — in the Internet’s early days, bloggers like Josh Marshall drove tremendous change by challenging traditional media narratives.

During the Iraq War, for example, when the Bush administration tried shaping the story by enacting policies that banned news coverage of military coffins returning home, bloggers like Alex Horton, then an Army infantryman first stationed in Mosul, were reporting what was really happening in the Middle East. “There was this total censorship and this deep unsettling aversion to what was going on, led by the government,” says Horton.

Hear how bloggers fought the power by reporting the truth and how anti-war organizations used the internet to coordinate what is still considered to be the largest protest event in history. While you listen, ask yourself: Can newsletter journalists make it happen again?

Listen to “Establishing Connection,” episode two of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet, wherever you get your podcasts.

What do you think are the benefits of people going from big media companies to newsletters? To me, it seems like they can suddenly say whatever they want and don’t have to worry about what the billionaire owner thinks.

I think that is 100% the case. The downside, obviously, is you don’t have that corporate money to do things with, but you do have that independence. It is this sort of paradox that this new publishing world has come about right when it becomes really necessary. It’s almost impossible for a news organization to exist in a legitimate way if it is owned by a big, diversified corporation, just because the news organization is never going to be the profit center. At best, it’s just a break-even proposition.

If you were in a political context, like we are with Trump, the executive can harass a big, diversified corporation. It’s just not workable. That’s why, as we’ve seen, you get ABC News handing a big check to Trump. It’s ironic, but this is why The New York Times doesn’t do that. It sort of sounds crazy to say that they’re an independent publication, but in a basic way, they are.

They’re just The New York Times, right? They don’t have mergers they need approved. They don’t have food and dry goods. They don’t have all these things that other companies do, or these things that are sensitive to regulation. With independent publications, you can basically say, “As long as our subscribers don’t ditch us, we don’t give a fuck.” As long as you have your subscribers, you don’t have to worry about a vibe shift. You don’t have to worry about corporate executives who don’t want to get in trouble with the president.

It’s funny because for a long time, this was one of our big selling points. We’re an independent publication, and independent publications are really important. Starting in like 2024, that became true at a whole new level. It started becoming very clear that you can say things that the big news organizations simply cannot, because they’re too vulnerable.

Lastly, I just want to ask how you’re feeling about the state of journalism right now?

Well, I think journalism is still very embattled, and things continue to be not great, but we do have a lot of good things happening. The reality is that a TPM or a 404 Media or a Bulwark still just have orders of magnitude lower resources than big news organizations. So as much as it’s great to subscribe to them, and those organizations are doing well, in a global sense, you still don’t have the same caliber of resources in journalism in general.

I think it’s still a mixed picture, but there are a lot of exciting things going on, and I think they’re sustainable. I feel pretty bullish about journalism. I recognize that things are still far from ideal, and it’s important to have a diversity of business models. You want people doing a lot of different things, because that’s just a healthy ecosystem. A lot of different kinds of experimentation happening.

Further reading from Josh Marshall:

• “‘Do You Speak Billionaire?’ and Other Stories From the Fall of the Washington Post” (Talking Points Memo, February 5, 2026)
• “The Fight Is Upon Us: What The Right to Vote Looks Like on Trump’s Terrain of Violence” (Talking Points Memo, February 2, 2026)
• “Remembering the Boston Massacre as Minneapolis Writhes Under Occupation” (Talking Points Memo, January 26, 2026)
• “Watch What They’re Doing: Trump Threatens to Make War on the States” (Talking Points Memo, January 16, 2026)