If you’ve been reading TPM for awhile, you may already know that our organization can shift on a dime. We typically have around five reporters. (A few of our editors also write.) That means, unlike larger news organizations, we don’t have people with particular beats. We don’t have people who author a particular kind of story — no one who just writes breaking news or just writes features or just does a newsletter or a podcast. Everyone, at any moment, can pitch in with anything on any topic.
Though it wasn’t always the result of a conscious decision on the part of the editors, TPM has made use of this flexibility during this unprecedented time. We’ve reinvented our approach to the news repeatedly since August 2024, when our last Journalism Fund drive concluded, with our reporters working in different modes and in different styles across a wide range of topics to contend with a historic moment in American history.
As we reflect on the many ways TPM is unique during the journalism fund drive, I thought readers might enjoy a glimpse of how we see the journey we’ve traveled over the last year — in terms of what we understood ourselves to be providing to readers, and what we understood readers to need from us.
