I've just read that @TPM is 20 years old today. That is, frankly, insane.

A (not) very brief appreciation thread:

I was one of the first employees at TPM. There were ~5 of us working in a railroad apartment above a flower shop in Chelsea. Our desks were cheap folding poker tables. The internet was no longer a fad, but people still thought “blogger = basement + cheetos."

What @joshtpm and the rest of the staff was doing was new and shocking and prescient. Given how many TPM alums are now scattered across the journalism industry, I know I wasn’t the only one whose career was shaped by what they learned there. 3 things stick out:

1/ Your audience is smarter than you. Not all of them, but a lot of them. And certainly collectively! The team read every email to talk @ http://talkingpointsmemo.com . We posted Congressional committee reports mid-investigation and asked readers to dig in with us.

(That investigation won @TPM a Polk Award and led to the resignation of the Attorney General.)

We saw that if you treat your audience like the curious and intelligent people they are, they will help you get smarter. They'll even report along with you!

2/ People trust people. And your audience only knows you’re a person if you’re willing to be vulnerable, human, informal, maybe even weird. It even turned out that if you made a mistake, owned it, and explained it they’d trust you more!

Mistakes and informality have now been weaponized in this new social media era, but it’s still true: if you want people to trust you you have to let them know you.

3/ If you care about great journalism, you have to care about how to pay for it. Josh was the Editor *and* the Publisher. You don’t have to do it exactly that way, but...

You can’t trust the business of journalism to people who 1. fundamentally don’t care about business, or 2. fundamentally don’t care about journalism. If you do, you’ll be left with something good that dies, or something bad that lives.

My list could go on. And someone should track down the murderers row of journalism talent that has worked and learned at TPM. Would be a great story.

Finally, at @TPM I got to edit both @jessicavalenti and @SenWarren. I married one of them.

Happy 20th @TPM.