When is a website not a website? For Talking Points Memo, the turning point was in 2012

About six months ago, Talking Points Memo publisher Josh Marshall had a realization. It was something that had been bouncing around in his head for a while, but only then was he sure: It was time to formally deconstruct the idea of TPM as a website first — even though it was a website first, some 12 years ago when he started it.

“If someone were to ask me a year ago, I would have said, ‘Well, yeah, we’re not just a website — it’s this, and we have that, and the other.’ But I think it was when I saw mobile growing as fast as it was that it just sort of hit me at a different level,” Marshall told me. “Inevitably, as long as mobile was something like five percent of traffic, it was just something you made available on the side. But you start to see, this is going to be half of our audience. We can’t be approaching it in a way that the website is the thing, and we’re making imitations of it — because this thing is losing its primacy. In a lot of ways, it wasn’t until late last year that it hit me at a different level. It hit me as more than a concept. It was really true.”