How Talking Points Memo Lasted a Quarter Century

Josh Marshall reflects on building “a tabloid for smart people” and how his politics blog survived in a “chaotic and unstable and bad business.”

When the White House declared last month that reporters would no longer have free access to the West Wing offices of press secretary Karoline Leavitt and other top communications officials, the staff at Talking Points Memo was relatively unfazed. The progressive political blog, which turns twenty-five this month, launched its Washington vertical in 2009 with the informal motto “In it but not of it.” TPM has used its outsider status to its advantage, getting scoops on stories like George Santos’s credit card fraud. “The access that news organizations had at the Pentagon and the White House is very important. They should have it. Hopefully they will get it back,” Josh Marshall, TPM’s founder and editor in chief, said. “But those are never where big stories are going to come from.”

Marshall was thirty-one years old and working at the American Prospect when he founded TPM in 2000. White House hopefuls George W. Bush and Al Gore were duking it out over the Florida recount, and the crisis became fodder for Marshall’s first, 254-word TPM post. “In the twenty-five years since, we have had escalating crises where each one seems much, much worse, and things that seemed bad at the time now seem semi-quaint,” Marshall said. “And here we are in a crisis that is much, much graver.”