>> ladies and gentlemen, grover norquist -- >> q&a with josh marshall. david cameron and then cpac speeches by rick santorum, mitt romney and newt gingrich. >> this week, josh marshall, publisher and editor of talkingpointsmemo.com -- a news organization featuring breaking news, opinions, and reporting. >> josh marshall, how would you

describe what you do? >> i am publisher. i am also the editor of the news websites. i am involved in the editorial and publishing side of the operation. that is what i do. i publish a news websites. >> how long have you done it? i have done it for 11 years. we employ a number of journalists. it is able company with everything that goes with that. for the first five or six years, it was a one-man show. >> can you remember the first moment you said, i want to do this, myself? create this website?

>> yes. i think there were a couple of moments where i had that where i did not do it yet. false starts. when i was in graduate school, i was involved in website design to support myself. i put together a newsletter that was about things having to do with the internet. i liked it. i think i liked being a publisher, putting something together. when i got into being a political journalist, i had an urge to do something like it. it only came together at the end of the 2000 election. when the place i was working at the time called the american

prospect, it was biweekly. it came out twice a month. a very different thing. i had an urge to do something like this. i was on vacation, what was supposed to be the week after the 2000 election, which, as it turned out, it was still going on in florida. i started then. i was addicted from the beginning. >> you were born where? >> i was born in st. louis, missouri in 1969. >> your parents did what? >> complicated. my father was a graduate student at the time. he was getting his ph.d.

when i was born, my mother was working as an administrative assistant at washington university. they were hippies and academics. >> your mother died early? >> yes. she died in 1981. >> went to a web school. >> yes. it is a boarding school. a private boarding school in claremont, california. they have a small number of days students and i was one of them. i was a scholarship kid there. it is a great place. it was great for me. it was a great place for me. it helped me to start to become who i was. >> why? >> why was it important? >> what happened there that made

a difference? >> it is a small place. you know, my family did not have the means to send me there and i was lucky to get scholarships and stuff like that. small, private education, they tend -- there is more attention. they can give individual attention to students, especially those who are not cut from the typical mold. i was very interested in history and politics. not the politics i write about, but political history. although i did not see it that way at that time, i was, you know, i was only a couple of years away from my mother having

died. there is probably, you know, a little more community that was important for me, even though i did not realize that at the time. >> school was in claremont, california. >> 40 miles east of the l.a. >> where was your father? >> at that time, he was -- he had left being an academic. he did marine biology and he was in photography. for most of that time, he was working and owning a photography store in that little area. >> why -- princeton? >> yes. >> what did i take to get in?

>> i am not sure. [laughter] i think when i was in high school, i grew up in southern california, i think i had this thing that you should go to one of these east coast schools that have been around for a long time. i have never been to the east coast. literally, never been. i had never been east of the mississippi river. maybe into west virginia once. as often is the case with colleges, the reason you go there has very little to do with -- it may turn out to be a disaster, but you do not know what you are getting into. i was very ambitious.

i wanted to go to the best school that i could. in schools like that, a prep school kind of thing, there is a lot of push into that. >> how did i turn out? >> i really enjoyed it. it was great for me. i studied history. i remember that princeton was one of the schools you could actually, on your application, put down what you wanted to be evaluated on. why, i do not know. yes, i studied history.

that was until i was in my mid- 2010. i wanted to be a history professor. >> i know you have a ph.d. and i will talk about that. your web site, talkingpointsmemo.com, where did you get the name? >> the name actually came from -- for people who remember the late 1990's, part of the arcana of that scandal was that there was supposed to be talking points memo -- make sure i get the history right. again, the allegation was one of the president's lawyers had written the talking points memo, a list of instructions for how to respond to questions. monica lewinsky had given legal trips. this was sort of the great white whale for people who were

trying to find that thing that would bring the president down because if it had existed, that would have been the connection that someone directly tied to the president was trying to interfere with that investigation. it was never found. you do not always know what you are naming when you name 90. when i first came up with it, it was an art reference to that. my take on answers to important questions of the day.

>> had bill o'reilly called a the talking points memo? >> i did not know anything about it. i realize it a couple of years later. he may have started using it a short time before i did. even now, i do not know. >> does it cause a problem? >> no. his is on tv. this is a website. it has never been an issue. >> how long were you the only person at the website? >> the first employee that we hired was in the spring of 2005. that was five or six years. i had a couple unpaid interns before that who were very helpful, but they were not paid. they agree to do research projects for me.

>> how many people come to your web site on a daily basis? the different people? >> the metric we use is unique visitors. on an average weekday, we get about 200,000 unique visitors to the site. >> how many per month? >> upwards of 3 million. and sometimes over that. it is growing. the audience grew by about 40% last year. >> how many people work for you? >> at this moment, we have 28 full-time staff. >> based where? >> new york. two-thirds of the staff is in new york and arrested here in washington, d.c. >> back in 2002, we had a camera in a room on capitol hill.

we were the only camera there. after we showed this, a lot of things began to happen and i think they have had an impact on your life. let us run this clip and see what you can tell us about it. >> it is a pleasure for me to be here with you today. i know you are enjoying every minute of this. i knew that the previous remarks would be just as they were. after all, bob dole received the nomination and was almost elected telling strom thurmond jokes. [laughter] i want to say this about my state, when strom thurmond and president, we voted for him. [laughter] we are proud of him. [applause] we would not have had all these problems are over all of these years if the rest of the country had followed us. >> strom thurmond was 100 years old there. bob dole -- strom thurmond is dead.

what impact did that have on you? >> it had a big impact on the evolution of the website. that was picked up, i believe, over night on abc radio. that was basically it. >> was one of a million things that went through the news that was never heard of again. >> it was not even on in the evening. >> there were a few times where -- there was no secret that it had happened. it was out there. it was one of those cases where what he said right there, just the background, is that in 1948, the election that trent lott was referring to, strom thurmond

ran as a candidate, the part of the southern democrats. he ran on segregation. the racial system of the old south. and in the 20 to 30 years after that, strom thurmond, maybe 25 years after that, strom thurmond continue to be the person who was most most strongly identified with racial segregation. he ushered the southern democratic party into the republican party. the implication of that remark was that if strom thurmond had won, segregation would have won and we wouldn't have all those problems that we have today. if you say that this guy who was the champion of segregation had won, what are all those problems? it is hard not to infer that the problems have to do with racial equality and everything

that stemmed from it. tpm was one of just a couple places that said, wait a second. this guy is one of the most senior people in the u.s. government today, trent lott. at the time, he was senate majority leader. he was saying that we took a wrong turn when we raised racial equality. people said that he had a

birthday party for a man who was old, this is a throwaway remark. what is the problem? the problem for lott was that he had a history of identification with segregationish policy. everybody knew that, but they had sort of, that's trent lott -- whatever. people had known this more in the 1980's when he was starting out. by 2002, i t was a different day. >> used to be a democrat. >> again, he was part of the exodus of southern democracy. senator jim eastland, one of the iconic segregation leaders at

the time. it created this sort of tpm timeout. >> when did you first hear this? did somebody call you? >> i first heard about it from a reader the next morning. because i believe it was actually picked up in abc's "the note." one of the big political pundits was in charge of writing it. it was an overnight cheat sheet for politics. someone sent it to me.

i got it exactly. it was all clear to me what that all men. it went from there. it was a big thing for tpm because we were sort of the site that make it a story. we were not the only one. i had a pretty big role. the way the news works -- they are simplified. tpm made this story, started this sort of bonfire. it consumed trent lott's career. i t was a big thing for us. the site had already been around for two years. it took it up a big level. i think it was also a big thing for new media because one of the things that new media -- and i mean the internet and all of the media today that does not work in the old and new cycle,

24 our weekly news cycle -- a site like tpm is able to say, wait. this means a little more attention. they can really focus in on it in a way that the more ordered and news-cycle based media at that time was not able to do. >> let us run some video that you put together about this story and we will ask you about that. ♪ ♪

>> hi. it is josh marshall. that was trent lott along with senator larry craig, both have seen happier days when they were members of the group's singing centers. yesterday, senator lott came forward and announced he will be resigning his seat in the u.s. senate some time before the end of the year. it looks like so he can baggy big lobbying position before the new rules come into effect in 2008. in honor of his departure, we will take a trip down memory lane today. as you may know, tpm has a history with senator lott. back in 2002, tpm was early in fighting the importance of his comments about senator strom thurmond. you, this was a segment on pbs's news hour from a few months after that that was about tpm and blogging.

here is that wonderful moment when senator lott rrevealed his nostalgia for the segregation in the south. >> we voted for strom thurmond. we are proud of it. [applause] if the rest of the country had followed us, we would not have had all of these problems over all of these years. >> it took him about a week to go down the drain into political oblivion back in 2002. >> what did you do the video for? do you do that? >> we are bringing it back. we did it for two years in 2007 and 2008. it was four days a week, a daily web show about five minutes. a different topic every day.

everything from breaking news to stitching together stories that have moved. we are going to bring that back for the 2012 cycle. >> the thing about that event that you are talking about, our cameras were there and we were the only one in the world. you were the one that sent it viral. trent lott would not have had to step down. >> i think that is true. >> how often do you see new media doing that thing today? how often have you done it? >> you know, the media ecosystem is such a different world today than it was -- it is hard to believe that was 10 years ago. things like that happen all the time now. i know that there are many big stories that tpm has had over the last decade.

now we have an editorial staff of 20 people so we are breaking stories right and left. it has almost become commonplace. it is not nearly as surprising today as it was back then. >> i want to show you some video of a man named henry copeland. >> everybody here knows in the early days, blogs were about authentic writings. over time, people started to write about stuff that interested them. 100,000 other people, 1 million people some blogs reached 10 million people. and you become a media player. you are no longer a little person writing a diary. you are a big media player.

what we did back in 2000 was we said, these guys have these unique audiences, let us connect advertisers with the audiences. >> what impact did he have on tpm? >> a big one. >> who is he? >> he runs a company which is an advertising network that places advertisements on blocks. -- blogs. today, we have almost 30 employees and offices in two cities. we have a very big prescence in washington. we have highly influential audiences. we are a full-fledged news organization. when i met henry back in 2002 or 2003 -- at the time, i

eventually wanted to sort of do with tpm what i have since done. i did not think it was ready. i didn't think there was the demand to start doing advertising, which again, it is our lifeblood today. the first few times he contacted me and said that we should do this, i think i kind of blew him off. i was so focused on building the site. i was so focused on the stories i was working on that it took him persistence to sort of track me down and get me to focus on what he was proposing. he finally did. i am very glad that he did because in short order, we went into business together. we became business partners. it started bringing in revenue for tpm and the immediate travel -- relevance of that is that i was able to dedicate all

of my time to growing the site. when i started tpm, i was still the washington editor of "the american prospect." after that, i left and i was freelancing. in 2001, the economy was not doing great. especially the publishing economy. it was a terrible time to be freelancing. i was spending most of my time trying to build tpm for no money. free-lance journalism about politics is not a big growth sector. it is not a way to make big

money. henry allowed me to make tpm into a vital business. that is a critical thing that i would have never been able to -- that would have never got it to where it is now had he not kind of provide the apparatus that made it a viable business model for a number of years. we still do some business with his business. it is not a primary part of what we do. henry tracked me down and forced me to pay attention so that he could set me up with a business model that allowed me to make a big leap forward for tpm. >> how much revenue can you generate in a year? >> sure. well -- i am trying to think

what i can say. you know. a company like tpm can bring in millions of dollars of revenue per year. >> private company? >> totally private. >> for-profit? >> for profit. it registered in the state of new york. >> i found this in the american journalism review in january -- >> to be precise, a company like that can do something. we bring in multiple millions of dollars. that can mean a lot of things. >> it is growing? >> yes. >> i want to read this and have you break it down. "tpm's origins of the left- leaning political blog could affect its credibility for some -- tpm is an advocacy operation that is moving towards journalism --"

do you agree with that? >> not really. i think there is always been something called opinion journalism. it is with the new republic has done for almost one century. professionally, i cannot of opinion journalism. i think tpm that think started as. it was never an advocacy organization. that was not what i was doing. it definitely was opinion journalism, which is its own kind of unique beast. you are coming from having

certain viewpoint on the issues of the day, not putting yourself forward as a disinterested observer. we are different from that now. i quibble a bit with what he said. >> "the amount of original reporting is a small part of what they do. he distinguishes traditional opinion where writers expect to arrive at preconceived notions." pendants "see themselves of agents of a movement and many blockers feel the same way -- it remains to be seen as tpm evolves whether they are going to be the journalism of opinion or the journalism of affirmation." >> i would quibble with that. if you look at what tpm does -- we have an editorial staff of 20 people. we have hired people from places like "the washington times." we have people who have gone on

to work at "the new york times." these are journalists. we have , like many news organizations, we divide up what we publish between a news section and an opinion section.

we have an editors blog. that was what tpm originally was. in the editor's blog, much of his opinion. you would find the same on other newspapers editorial pages. what we produce in now news section -- in our news section is as good as everybody else. >> here is some video from tpmtv, july 25, 2007. it is you reporting. >> it is wednesday, july 25, 2007. we asked the question, why can president bush fire the attorney general? our answer was, he can. as soon as he fires him, he

would have to appoint a new attorney general. he will not keep all of the coverups in place. yesterday, alberto gonzalez went up to the senate for another round of hearings. it was such a train wreck. so much ridiculousness. this guy is un-fireable. >> how did you get into this story and what impact did you have? >> this is a story that tpm won an award for. we are the first online news organization to win that award. this was an unprecedented firing that was revealed to be for political reasons. it led to the resignation of

alberto gonzales. tpm had a big role in breaking that story. it was me, and another reporter who did the actual reporting on it. it was a case where a lot of it was good reporting. two things allowed us to do it better things that are unique to new media. one is, we used our audience as part of our reporting process. one of the ways that we were able to put this together at the beginning -- what happened was, there were a number of u.s. attorneys who resigned

across the country and around the same time. i believe there were eight. no one put it together because there was nothing that seemed to be put together. there were things that were suspicious about a few of those cases. one particularly was the resignation of an attorney who had been involved in a corruption case in southern california. readers started tipping us off to these things. because we have that relationship with our readers, because our relationship always has been and still is core to our editorial process, we were able to see a pattern that others were not seeing. we kept -- again, there were only two reporters we had. we saw patterns others could not because we were using our

readers. the other thing is that we could focus on the story in a way that others were not able to. we were not the only one on the story by any means, but we stayed on it consistently. what we were also able to do was to our own original reporting and take pieces of information from other news organizations and stitch them together into one narrative where it all started to come together and make sense. what we were doing was a mix of original reporting and what i call intelligent aggregation, which again, the traditional news organizations were not and are not doing that. it was one of the stories i am most proud of that we ever worked on. i think back on it fondly, but i think -- it was important to the evolution of what media can do. >> do you remember where you got your first tip on that story?

>> yes. i was driving back with my family from long island -- i was driving out to long island and i got a call from a longtime reader who referenced the firing of carol lam. we talked about it. this was a source who was knowledgeable on this. we had also been pretty involved in reporting that do cunningham story. i knew something was not right about that. that was the first thing that made us focus. that was where it started for us. >> you appeared at the new york public library.

the old journalism versus the new journalism, what did you think? >> it is opinion journalism, so there is an element of advocacy to what i do. there is an element of journalism. i like to think i do it in a way where there is not a strong contradiction. there is trying to make a point. there is no pretense of being a disinterested observer to a lot of debates. there have been various times over the course of six years that i have been running the stories that i do that i have moved further into the direction of advocacy on a particular question. >> i got that confused with another clip. have you found people close to what you do? has it changed? >> yes. there is definitely some of that. i would say, have been

surprised at how much support there has been. not always public support. but support nonetheless. after the 2004 election, i got very involved in one story, which was when president bush was trying to privatize social security. that was probably -- i think this was around 2005 or 2006. i think that was probably what was in my mind at that point because that was the furthest i got in the direction of something like advocacy. it was that topic -- it was something that was so important

to me. that was also a time when i was trying to think in what direction i'm going to take this. i set tpm up as a company and i started hiring people. since then, our focus has been on reporting. anchoring it in journalism. >> do you -- you made a major decision in 2005 to increase the size of your company. if you did or whenever you did, where the to get the money? >> i did make that decision. in 2005 or 2006, as i said, i was a freelance journalist so i had no -- >> did you have a family? >> i had a -- i had a wife.

i was starting a family. >> how many kids now? >> in two sons. i have a five year-old and a three and a half year-old. i did make that decision. up until that point, tpm was my website. it had no legal assistance. it was not like a corporation. i did make that decision. what i did was, i went to readers to raise money. three times, i went to readers and i said each time, i want to do x -- i want to build a new part of the site. i asked people to send small contributions. they did 20 or $50. the three times i did that, that gave me the money to first watch tpm cafe. then tpm muckraker and then tpm

election central. after that, tpm -- we grew it out of its operating revenues. in 2009, for the first time, i brought in outside investors. we have done two investment rounds. we are just finishing the second up right now. we have outside investors. i am still by far the most majority investor. back to tpm cafe -- it was a group blog. it still is. outside contributors are blogging for the site. >> do you pay them?

>> they were all doing it for nothing. in some cases, we were reprinting other stuff. they wanted a place to write short updates on the news of the day. tpm muckraker was a site dedicated to investigative journalism. over the years, it has always been the one that is closest to my heart. tpm election central was the campaign coverage site. we launched the 2008 -- 2006 election cycle. it is on three different mutations. it originally became tpm d.c. for the 2010 cycle. now we have tpm 2012. >> here is the video you put together for 2008.

>> hi. it is josh marshall. it is friday, october 31, 2008. we want to give you an overview of our coverage that we will kick off at noon on monday. we want to tell you about -- we are featuring an election results map that you can follow on election day through election evening. you can watch the president to results as they come in state by state. the house races and the senate races. you can see what it looks like right there. we are putting that on monday afternoon. you can familiarize yourself with it and be ready for election night when the results start coming in. we will also have our tpmtv crew in chicago to bring you live reports from obama headquarters and the results on election night. on election day and night, we

have both video and tpmtv -- live reports on the front page of talkingpointsmemo.com. >> was very reason you did not have the camera at the john mccain headquarters? >> purely resources. in 2008, we still had seven employees. it was a major capital investment to send people anywhere. >> at this time, how expensive was doing those videos? how did you do them? >> at the time, we were doing things really by the skin of our teeth. we had a video camera. we were doing it in our office. we were doing something similar to that when we send people remote. we were looking at a big video

camera which, at that time, would have been more than we would have been able to purchase. we were able to do a lot with fairly little money. it was good enough to get across the basic information. >> did anyone complain about the video quality? [laughter] there were many comments. >> does it matter to the people who follow you? what does matter to them? why are they following you? >> they fall was because of the court quality of what we do.

we have evolved a lot. for many of our readers, we are one of their primary sources of political news. as we have grown, we are actually much more attentive to production quality. the ascetic quality of the site. we always try to keep pretty focused on that it is a set of values. it is a fundamental honesty with the readers that really keeps our audience tied to us. >> you are still packaging -- use a the kind of reporting is more honest. is more strict than a lot of things. you see, even on the front pages of great newspapers -- >> what i mean by that is, i think one of the great problems in journalism as it evolves in

the 20th century is that frequently, -- there is a war between balance and accuracy, with balance often winning. many journalists will tell you they have -- the report stories where it is pretty clear that one side is telling the truth than the other is not. the canyons of journalist -- journalistic opportunity does not give us the opportunity to say that. our motto -- we think about fundamental honesty with readers. we do not want there to be things we know are the case but we are not able or willing to share with readers. now, that is a different

approach to journalism. in many ways, it is a better way. >> when did you decide to get a ph.d. from brown? >> it is an early american history. he colonial period. i decided when i was in high school that that was what i wanted to do. i went to brown because my adviser there was a very famous revolutionary war historian. i went there to study with him. i ended up studying a period distant from his kind of core area of focus, which is what my dissertation was about. 17th century new england.

and the economic relations and violent interactions between indians and settlers in southern new england. >> when did you finish? >> i finished in 2003. i was a full-time graduate student until 1997. i had gotten most of the dissertation written by that time i got my first journalism job. it sat for four years or so. it seemed like an eternity at that time. eventually i realized that if i did not do its and, i would never do it. if i did not do it soon, i would never do it. i set aside a year to finish it. for myself, for my father, who

has since passed away, -- he was already not healthy at that time. a i set a side that you're and not too long after the trent lott thing happened -- i got it done. i am very glad that i did. >> did you ever talk to trent lott about what happened? >> no. it has never come up. it is funny -- i have often heard tpm refer to that we got alberto gonzales fire. we probably contributed to it. i never said he should resign or that -- that is not just

reticence. in general, i do not like the idea of people losing their jobs. i do not think if you look back through tpm, you would ever see us pursuing correction stories extremely aggressively. we think they should be pursued aggressively, but i do not take pleasure in people going to gerald or losing their jobs or careers getting -- people going to jail or losing their jobs. >> hear you are on the stephen colbert show? >> why are you not wearing a

bathrobe? >> we have upped our game. >> now you look like an iranian politician. [laughter] >> i think this is important. [laughter] what do you mean news side? but we have professional reporters working for us. i call that a news site. >> now you have a staff of 28. that was just 2.5 years ago. how far are you going to go with this and what is the goal now? >> we want to go a lot farther than we are now. we want to be one of the country's preeminent news organizations. we have a very ambitious growth plan. we are not trying to move into everything under the sun.

our basic focus is a political news. we think we do it well. we want to keep refining it. we want to keep breaking news. in the last two years, we have doubled in size. over the next two years, i think we will double again. we do not want to stop. >> you started with what? it was just you? how much expense did you have in the first year? >> it cost me almost nothing to start. i have a website account the cost me $50 per month. maybe not even that. that actually got me -- now there are services that you set up a site and they are using templates.

there was a little bit of that then. i did not know much about it. even in my premiere state, it was nothing. at $30 per month. that got me through the first couple of years. i did not have to spend much more than that. it was just me and a laptop and that is one of the great things about the internet and what has happened to journalism. not just journalism, but communication over the last 15 years or so. you know, i had no money to invest. luckily, i did not need it at the beginning. >> where did you meet your wife? >> i met my wife in college. i did not see her again for a dozen years.

we reconnected in 2002. at the end of 2002 -- we dated for a year-and-a-half or something like that or two years. i was in d.c. and she was in new york. when we decided to get married, i move to new york. >> what does she do? >> at that time, she was a security's lawyer. she worked for dow jones. now, she left the dow jones after they were brought out by news corporation a couple of years ago. she worked for us as our general counsel. just a year ago, she went back to school to get an msw. she is going to become a therapist. >> msw? >> master's in social work. those are the people who do

counseling and talking therapy. >> i have to ask you about her last name. how did she get the name israeli? >> she was born in israel. her parents were born in palestine. her father's ancestors were from russia and i think that their name was something close to israeli. many jews who immigrated to palestine hebrewized their name. >> josh marshall editor and publisher of talkingpointsmemo.com -- tpm.com >> talkingpointsmemo.com, not tpm.com tpm.com is owned by an

industrial firm. >> thank you. [captioning performed by [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> for a dvd copy call 18776627726. for free transcripts or to give us comments, visit us at qanda.org. >> next, david cameron at a