Joshua Micah Marshall: Talking Points Memo 'Is Not a Website'

This is an interesting report, from Nieman Journalism Lab, "When is a website not a website? For Talking Points Memo, the turning point was in 2012":

As of late March, mobile — smartphones and tablets — accounted for 19 percent of TPM traffic. By early May, when I sat down with Marshall in his New York office, mobile traffic to TPM had passed the 20 percent mark.

“I don’t have much doubt that that number will be 30 or 40 percent in the next year or two,” Marshall said. “My only question is at what point tablets overtake smartphones.”

So what does this realization mean, from a practical standpoint, for TPM?

“More than anything else we had to shift our own thinking, because that was constraining with how you do things on mobile,” Marshall said. “Realizing that TPM is not a website — it’s a bundle of knowledge and expertise and ongoing coverage that exists inherently on no particular platform, and we are consitently trying to find ways to make it adaptable on as many platforms as possible.”

But the rethinking process also means rejecting the idea that TPM content can be one-size-fits-all, which deputy publisher Callie Schweitzer calls “a game-changer for all publishers.”

“We’re giving a lot of thought to three different kinds of consumption: Active consumption being at the desktop, on-the-go consumption being on your mobile phone, and passive consumption being in your bed, on your tablet, something like that,” Schweitzer said. “For me, it’s literally about the physical way you’re doing it. You can certainly actively consume at all of those different places but when you’re reclining, looking at a beautiful visual on an iPad, it’s very different than being on a mobile phone or sitting at a desktop.”

I've noticed some folks have been reading American Power on their mobile devices. If you haven't yet, but are thinking about it, here's the mobile URL: http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/?m=1. Looking at that link, most of the photos and embedded videos are showing up just fine. So bookmark the blog on your devices and you'll be good to go.

P.S. While I don't agree politically with Josh Marshall, I think they're doing a pretty good job over there --- and you may have noticed that I use their videos a lot.