The Rebooting Show Talking Points Memo's small-boat strategy
Oct 28, 2025
Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo, shares insights from 25 years of navigating an independent political newsroom. He discusses the 'small-boat strategy' that prioritizes resilience over scale and the challenges of programmatic advertising. Marshall explains how TPM's early pivot to a membership model provided crucial stability during an advertising collapse. He reflects on the impact of Google’s dominance, the rise of independent journalism, and the ongoing significance of human perspective in media, posing questions about the future of journalism in an AI-driven world.
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Small-Boat Realism
- Small organizations must adapt to the environment because they cannot outspend trends or pretend to buck large forces.
- Josh Marshall says being a 'small boat on a big ocean' made TPM more reactive and realistic.
Membership Before The Crash
- TPM launched a membership program at the end of 2012 before others and built it seriously by 2014.
- That early subscription base (≈20,000 by 2017–18) was critical to surviving the ad collapse.
Traffic-Era Fragility
- The 'traffic era' and programmatic ad model were fragile because platform concentration eroded value.
- Josh recognized the ad-driven model was dying and prioritized building direct audience revenue.