page_title: Josh Marshall
section_title: Reaching a critical mass
hierarchical_section_title: Josh Marshall / Talking Points Memo / Reaching a critical mass
caption_attribution_description: Josh Marshall at the Personal Democracy Forum in May 2007
context_page_description: Joshua Micah Jesajan-Dorja Marshall is an American journalist and blogger who founded Talking Points Memo, which in 2004 The New York Times Magazine called "one of the most popular and most respected sites" in the blogosphere. A liberal, he currently presides over a network of progressive-oriented sites that operate under the TPM Media banner and average 400,000-page views every weekday and 750,000 unique visitors every month.
  Marshall and his work have been profiled by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, National Public Radio, The New York Times Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Moyers Journal, and GQ. Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor at The New Yorker, compares Marshall to the influential founders of Time magazine. "Marshall is in the line of the great light-bulb-over-the-head editors. He’s like Briton Hadden or Henry Luce. He’s created something new."
context_section_description: Inspired by political bloggers such as Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, Marshall started Talking Points Memo during the 2000 Florida election recount. "I really liked what seemed to me to be the freedom of expression of this genre of writing," Marshall told the Columbia Journalism Review. "And, obviously, given the issues that I had with the Prospect, that appealed to me a lot."
  He left his job at the Prospect early in 2001 and continued to blog while writing for The Washington Monthly, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Salon.com, and the New York Post. In 2002, Marshall used Talking Points Memo to report on Trent Lott's controversial comments praising Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential run as a segregationist. According to the Kennedy School of Government, Marshall was instrumental in fueling the ensuing scandal that eventually led to Trent Lott's resignation as Senate Minority Leader.
  As a result of the Lott story, traffic to Talking Points Memo spiked from 8,000 to 20,000 page views a day. In the fall of 2003, as people focused on the failure to find WMD's in Iraq, there was a new surge of traffic to the site; "I remember there being peak days of 60,000-page views, which was really incredible." Marshall started selling ads on his site and by the end of 2004 was earning $10,000 a month, making him one of a handful of what The New York Times Magazine dubbed "elite bloggers" who earned enough money to make blogging a full-time occupation.
  During the 2008 US election campaign, many independent news sites and political blogs saw a wave of "explosive growth". Talking Points Memo experienced the largest surge in traffic, growing from 32,000 unique visitors in September 2007 to 458,000 unique visitors in September 2008, a 1,321% year-to-year increase in the size of its audience.
caption: Marshall at the Personal Democracy Forum in May 2007
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