Traffic begat buzz, which begat advertising, which begat enough money that Marshall could stop hustling for freelance writing gigs. He wasn’t getting rich by any means, but in 2004, TPM became a business rather than a hobby. Marshall still didn’t have a sales staff — nor does he have one today, unless you count Golis, a 2006 graduate of Harvard who spends much of his time negotiating with Google, which feeds TPM many of its ads, and the so-called remnant bureaus, firms that sell ad space on a wide range of Web sites. And it wasn’t beneath the blogger to issue occasional appeals for donations, a practice he still doesn’t completely swear off. (Reader contributions have funded trips for reporters to cover presidential primaries, and even the hiring of reporters for Muckraker.)

“What we do to raise revenue is feeble,” Marshall says, but he takes a certain pride in TPM’s scruffy independence. He rebuffs all expressions of interest from outsiders looking to buy up successful blogs. “I like having complete control over what we do, and so far, the revenue is supporting us.” It helps that the interns are unpaid and most of the staffers — many of whom are just out of college — earn less than the national average household income of $48,000. “This is not a career place,” Marshall says. “It’s a place where you get experience.” Indeed, some TPM graduates are moving on to bigger and better-paying journalism jobs, at, for example, Pro Publica, the new, nonprofit investigative-journalism boutique that seeks to place its stories in major publications around the country; and at Huffington Post, the well-funded competing blog in a fancier part of Manhattan. “Hardly any of the people who leave here are going into the existing media structure,” Marshall says.

That could be in part because old mainstream news organizations aren’t hiring these days (though one TPM alumnus is now at ABC News), but it’s also because some TPM staffers come to the studio apartment on Sixth Avenue not only to be reporters, but to work toward a political goal — in this case, the center-liberal Democratic perspective that girds Marshall’s work. “Working here is a mix of activism and reporting,” says Golis. Marshall calls the TPM approach “our own version of objectivity.” Although the bloggers and most readers who comment on the site make no bones about their liberal persuasion, “our news blog should operate in a way that even a dyed-in-the-wool Republican could discern the facts separate from any point of view,” Marshall says.

He insists that Muckraker devotes at least as much of its bandwidth and reporting energies to wayward Democrats as to misbehaving Republicans. “We never try to hide our point of view,” he says, “but we have the grudging respect of the Republican campaigns.” Because TPM has no beat reporters, it has no ongoing relationship with the presidential campaigns. Still, the site’s writers generally get the cooperation they need (the only campaign that “never gave us the time of day was Rudy Giuliani’s,” Marshall says).

Like any writer, Marshall enjoys having an impact. And certainly his instinct to grab hold of the U.S. attorney firings story last year pushed TPM to a new level. Once again, Marshall turned to his readers as participants in the reporting process: When the Justice Department released 3,000 pages of documents that provided details of the Bush administration’s politicization of the selection of federal prosecutors, hundreds of TPM readers helped Marshall pore through the legal jargon and identify the most revealing passages. That collaboration, driven by Marshall’s own analysis and the sense of urgency he creates in his nearly 24/7 blogging, won him the Polk Award. (TPM “connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush administration’s bidding,” the award citation said.) It also got him back on the Justice Department e-mail list, from which TPM had been removed.

But Marshall remains wary of the price that journalism and society pay for mass media, which he says almost inevitably create a bland flow of information, bleached of point of view. To reach a mass audience, “you have to retreat from making judgments,” he says. Blogs may be boutique operations, but “the fluidity and instability of the new media are a civic plus,” he argues. “Things are less predictable for politicians, and that’s good. There are fewer choke points for information. The diversity of voices is a good compensation for the loss of a common narrative that everyone at the pub knows.”

But can blogs expand their journalistic impact without reaching for a much larger readership? Marshall is not indifferent to the fact that TPM’s audience “definitely skews affluent and educated,” Marshall says. Early on, it was “mortifyingly male,” though the gender mix has improved somewhat. The audience for political blogs, both left and right, had stagnated in the two years before the 2008 campaign sent readership numbers soaring. But with the end of the election cycle, that spike in traffic will disappear, and Marshall will be faced with this reality: Advertisers aren’t very interested in the hard-core users who live on the blogs; they want to reach a mass of people. To enlarge their audience, blogs must find ways to broaden their content, ideally without losing the intimacy and sophistication that won them a following in the first place.

Marshall is more interested in the journalism than in the business side of the operation, which is one reason his wife is diving into the work. Israeli believes the next phase in the evolution of blogs is for advertisers to shift large portions of their ad budgets to “nonmainstream digital media. Not only can they target the audiences they want to attract, but they can clearly get more bang for their buck — that is, more eyeballs on their ads for far less money than the newspapers and TV networks are charging. The younger audiences — the so-called Gen Y’ers — just don’t read newspapers, watch network television, or even go to the newspapers’ or networks’ Web sites at anything like the levels of people in their 30s and over.”

One way TPM is moving to reach a broader crowd is by adding a lot of video. And although the site’s focus remains firmly on politics, TPM also is attracting some of the country’s top literary voices to write essays on TPM Café. There’s no money in it for the likes of social critics Todd Gitlin and Richard Florida, fiction writers Mary Karr and Robert Stone, or political analysts such as Woodrow Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80, but they agree to mix it up with TPM readers because the level of debate is unusually high and the number of places where serious discussions of current books can occur seems to shrink by the month. (Writers also get to push their own books, a welcome advantage as newspapers close or slash their book-review sections.)

But although the all-consuming nature of round-the-clock blogging is a match for Marshall’s personality, he and Israeli have two children under the age of 2, and both parents crave some time at home. That has Marshall thinking about his blog, what it has become and where it might go.

“I’m intense,” he says. “I built this organization on intensity. But I don’t like the idea of a society built on intensity, where the only successful enterprises are those built on constant motion. I like what we do, but you also need the 10,000-word piece in The New Yorker and the beat reporter in The Washington Post .”

In 2005, Marshall started work on a book on Henry Hudson and other 16th- and 17th-century explorers of the Arctic. But TPM’s success and growth made it impossible to focus on a long project. Marshall hopes to go back to the book, even if he has to wait a decade or so to return to a slower, deeper kind of work. Pre-blog, as a freelancer for Washington Monthly , The Atlantic , and other magazines, Marshall relished the luxury of “being steeped in the reporting. Part of that I do miss. I’m no longer building the deep well of knowledge of new topics the way I did.”

Increasingly, the TPM brand stands on its own. This year, for the first time, some stories appear on the site without having been vetted by the founder. “It’s been at least my goal over the past couple of years to de-me-ify TPM,” Marshall says. He smiles self-consciously. “There are limits to that.”

Indeed, many readers still think clicking onto TPM is the electronic equivalent of a visit inside Marshall’s mind — and there is some truth to that image. Success on the Web is very much linked to personality, and Marshall’s achievement stems from his ability to package his political perspective and his faith in the power of reporting, mix in his passion, and produce a journalism that connects to its audience in new ways, yet remains, ultimately, intensely personal. TPM may have a national name, a burgeoning audience, and an energetic team of young journalists toiling away in their room above the flower shop, but it’s still Josh Marshall’s blog.

Marc Fisher ’80, a writer for The Washington Post , is the author of Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution that Shaped a Generation.

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