Josh Marshall
Template:Short description Template:For Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox person Joshua Micah Jesajan-Dorja Marshall (born February 15, 1969) is an American journalist and blogger<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> who founded Talking Points Memo.<ref name="ep-polk-award">Template:Cite news</ref> A liberal, he presides over a network of progressive-oriented sites that operate under the TPM Media banner. In 2008, they averaged 400,000 page views on weekdays<ref name='cjr-josh-marshall-plan'>Template:Cite news</ref> and 750,000 unique visitors per month.<ref name=nytimes-blogger-prize/><ref name="brown-bloggers">Template:Cite news</ref>
Marshall and his work have been profiled by The New York Times,<ref name='nytimes-blogger-prize'>Template:Cite news</ref> the Los Angeles Times,<ref name='latimes-blogs-can-top-the-presses'>Template:Cite news</ref> the Financial Times,<ref name='ft-quick-off-the-blog'>Template:Cite news</ref> National Public Radio,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The New York Times Magazine,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> the Columbia Journalism Review,<ref name='cjr-josh-marshall-plan'/> Bill Moyers Journal,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and GQ.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="gq-moty">Template:Cite news</ref> In 2007, Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor at The New Yorker, compared Marshall to the influential founders of Time magazine, saying: "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."<ref name='cjr-josh-marshall-plan'/>
Early life and careerEdit
Marshall was born in St. Louis, Missouri.<ref name='cjr-josh-marshall-plan'/><ref name='ft-quick-off-the-blog'/> Marshall's father was a professor of marine biology. His mother died when he was young.<ref name="nytimes-fear-and-laptops">Template:Cite news</ref>
He is a graduate of the Webb Schools of California and Princeton University and earned a PhD in American history from Brown University.<ref name="cjr-josh-marshall-plan" /><ref name="ft-quick-off-the-blog" /> In the mid-1990s, Marshall designed websites for law firms and published an online news site about Internet law, which included interviews with prominent scholars such as Lawrence Lessig.<ref name="cjr-josh-marshall-plan" />
Marshall began writing freelance articles about Internet free speech for The American Prospect in 1997 and was soon hired as an associate editor.<ref name="cjr-josh-marshall-plan" /> He worked for the Prospect for three years<ref name="nytimes-fear-and-laptops" /> and in 1999 moved to D.C. to become their Washington editor.<ref name="cjr-josh-marshall-plan" /> He often clashed with the top editors at the Prospect, over both ideology and the direction of the website.<ref name="cjr-josh-marshall-plan" />
Talking Points MemoEdit
HistoryEdit
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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."<ref name='cjr-josh-marshall-plan'/>
He left his job at the Prospect early in 2001<ref name='cjr-josh-marshall-plan'/> and continued to blog while writing for The Washington Monthly, The Atlantic, The New Yorker,<ref name="nytimes-fear-and-laptops"/> Salon.com, and the New York Post.<ref name='cjr-josh-marshall-plan'/> 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.<ref name='latimes-blogs-can-top-the-presses'/> According to Harvard Kennedy School, Marshall was instrumental in fueling the ensuing scandal that eventually led to Trent Lott's resignation as Senate Minority Leader.<ref name="nytimes-fear-and-laptops"/>
As a result of the Lott story, traffic to Talking Points Memo spiked from 8,000 to 20,000 page views a day.<ref name='cjr-josh-marshall-plan'/> 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."<ref name=nytimes-blogger-prize/> Marshall started selling ads on his site and by the end of 2004 was earning $10,000 a month,<ref name='cjr-josh-marshall-plan'/> 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.<ref name="nytimes-fear-and-laptops"/>
During the 2008 US election campaign, many independent news sites and political blogs saw a wave of "explosive growth".<ref name='comscore-explosive-growth'>Template:Cite news</ref> Talking Points Memo experienced the largest surge in traffic,<ref name='wsj-huffpo-beats-drudge'>Template:Cite news</ref> growing from 32,000 unique visitors in September 2007 to 458,000 unique visitors in September 2008,<ref name='mediapost-political-sites'>Template:Cite news</ref> a 1,321% year-to-year increase in the size of its audience.<ref name='portfolio-lefty-sites'>Template:Cite news</ref>
Launching TPM MediaEdit
In 2005, Marshall launched TPMCafe.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> This site features a collection of blogs about a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues written by academics, journalists and former public officials among others.
Marshall expanded his operation again in 2006, launching TPMmuckraker. The site focuses on political corruption, and was originally staffed by Paul Kiel and Justin Rood. Rood has since moved on to ABC and its blog The Blotter. Kiel has recently been joined by two new staff reporter-bloggers, Laura McGann and Spencer Ackerman. TPMmuckraker has attempted to organize its readers to plow through and read document dumps by governmental entities engaging in cover-ups.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
TPM Media operates out of an office in Manhattan and currently employs seven reporters, including two in Washington.<ref name=nytimes-blogger-prize/>
U.S. attorney controversyEdit
Template:2006 dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy small In 2007, Marshall was instrumental in exposing another national controversy — the politically motivated dismissal of U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration.<ref name="ep-polk-award"/> Marshall won The Polk Award for Legal Reporting for his coverage of the story, which "led the news media" and "connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration's bidding."<ref name="ep-polk-award"/> Columbia Journalism Review also credited Marshall's news organization for being "almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the fired U.S. Attorneys to a boil."<ref name='cjr-josh-marshall-plan'/> The ensuing scandal resulted in the resignations of several high-level government officials;<ref name='latimes-blogs-can-top-the-presses'/><ref name='ft-quick-off-the-blog'/> the Polk award in particular honored Marshall for his "tenacious investigative reporting" which "sparked interest by the traditional news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales."<ref name="nytimes-blogger-prize"/>
After a weekend writer noticed that the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas was being replaced with a former adviser to Karl Rove,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Marshall discovered that U.S. Attorney Carol Lam was also being asked to resign. Lam had successfully prosecuted Republican California Representative Duke Cunningham on bribery charges and was amid a criminal investigation into a congressional scandal of historic proportions.<ref name='ft-quick-off-the-blog'/> "I was stunned by it," Marshall told the Financial Times. "Normally, in a case like that, the prosecutor would be untouchable."<ref name='ft-quick-off-the-blog'/>
National newspapers were slow to pick up the story.<ref name='ft-quick-off-the-blog'/> Time magazine's Washington bureau chief Jay Carney accused Marshall of "seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> By the time The New York Times first reported on Lam's firing (on page 17), Marshall and his news sites had already posted 15 articles on the story.<ref name='ft-quick-off-the-blog'/>
Two months after posting his accusatory article, Carney apologized to Marshall. "Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo and everyone else out there whose instincts told them there was something deeply wrong and even sinister about the firings...deserve tremendous credit." Carney went on to write, "I was wrong. Very nice work, and thanks for holding my feet to the fire."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
For doggedly pursuing the story, Arianna Huffington nominated Joshua Marshall and the Talking Points Memo team to the Time 100.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Personal lifeEdit
Marshall married Millet Israeli in March 2005,<ref name='washington-note-wedding'>Template:Cite news</ref> and the couple live in New York City with their sons Sam and Daniel.<ref name='josh-marshall-bio'>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Prizes and honorsEdit
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- George Polk Award for Legal Reporting, 2007
- The Week Opinion Awards, Blogger of the Year, 2003 & 2007
- GQ Men of the Year, Muckraker, 2007
ReferencesEdit
External linksEdit
- Talking Points Memo
- Marshall's biography at Talking Points Memo.
- Video discussion/debate with Marshall and David Corn on Bloggingheads.tv
- Video discussion/debate with Marshall and Mickey Kaus on Bloggingheads.tv
- Template:C-SPAN