The Hi this is Josh Marshall and this is the Josh Marshall

podcast we're going to tell you right up front in this episode that this is a special abbreviated episode

and it is about the membership drive that we are doing now at TPM.

So it's about a membership drive. We're gonna... now at TPM.

So it's about a membership drive.

We're going to tell you why it's so important to subscribe to TPM, which is the publication

that publishes this podcast.

But we're also going to tell you a little more broadly about

about TPM about why memberships are so important and also just more broadly about

journalism so we're doing this drive for the last few years. We've done an annual drive every year, but this is a critical one because we're getting towards the end of a transition that we've been on for really four or five years now.

And that is a transition from a publication that is based on advertising revenues to one that is based on

memberships as the core part of our business model. So just to give you an example

back in 2014 that's only five years ago 97% of our

companies revenues came from advertising which is to say just about

everything and now that number is all the way down to just over

22 percent so that's a massive it's a huge huge change in just a few years now it wasn't a matter of that we woke up one day and decided,

you know what, we have all this advertising money, but we're going to go in a new direction because that's not the money we're interested in.

We made this change because the advertising economy and particularly in the last few years the digital advertising economy has really been totally upended and you have probably seen if you follow

Really if you if you just follow news generally, but if you follow news about journalism,

about the news business, you've seen a lot about this, and it has to do with automation,

it has to do with automation, it has to do with basically a glut of digital

publications which there actually has always been for a whole series of reasons.

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