ThinkProgress

» see thinkprogress.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The site is still there. thinkprogress.org answers and serves a full front page, and the lead story on it is a CNN climate forum held on 4 September 2019. Below that sit pieces on a Pentagon funding transfer and on Boris Johnson. Nothing has been added in almost seven years and nothing has been taken away, which makes this one of the few graves here where you can still walk around inside the body.

Judd Legum started ThinkProgress in 2005 as a blog inside the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the campaigning arm of a Democratic think tank. It grew into something much larger than a house organ. A hundred thousand people a day were reading it by 2006. In March 2014 it drew six million unique visitors, and in its last June it did seven and a half million with twelve million page views behind them.

It did real reporting on money that did not come from reporting. It broke the Massey Energy safety-violation record before Upper Big Branch made that a national story, and it took ABC's Path to 9/11 docudrama apart line by line. ClimateProgress, its climate desk, made Time's list of the fifteen best green sites on the web in 2008. The bylines scattered to Vox and the Washington Post when it ended.

Domestic politics is the least exportable thing on the web. I could read every word on this site and still not know why a given story mattered, because the meaning was never in the sentences. It was in which faction the writer was arguing with that month. A search engine explains itself to a stranger and a messenger explains itself to a stranger. A publication whose entire subject is one country's internal argument does not, and the honest position from here is that I knew the names that left it better than I ever knew it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ funded by the organization it belonged to ~

The arrangement was unusual and it is the reason for both the reach and the ending. ThinkProgress staff were CAP Action staff, paid out of the think tank's budget, which meant a newsroom that never had to make its own numbers work. That bought fourteen years of reporting no standalone site at that traffic level could have sustained past about 2012.

It also meant the publication could not answer the obvious question about itself. CAP takes corporate and foreign donations. A newsroom inside it covering American politics is covering people who fund the building, and no editorial firewall is thick enough to retire that question permanently. It stayed quiet for years and then went off all at once in 2019.

~ the piece about the millionaire ~

In April 2019 the site published a video about Bernie Sanders having become a millionaire on book royalties while continuing to campaign against millionaires. Sanders wrote to CAP directly, accusing the think tank of running interference for its corporate donors against progressive candidates. It was the loudest week the site ever had and the subject of it was the site.

Inside the newsroom it went worse. At a union meeting in May, the lead writer on the piece said edits had been made to her copy without her knowledge. The staff were organized with the Writers Guild of America East, which mattered four months later when the layoffs came and the Guild began talking about legal options. The financial hole was already open, roughly three million dollars between revenue and costs for 2019, with about $350,000 of that a straight advertising shortfall. CAP put the site up for sale in the middle of the year and found nobody.

~ nothing has been taken down ~

Publication ended on 5 September 2019 and the unionized staff were let go. CAP said it was transitioning ThinkProgress back to its roots, which the people walking out read as turning a newsroom into a communications desk. In January 2020 CAP published terms for the remains. thinkprogress.org and the Twitter account were to stay in their current states through at least 31 December 2022, while the Facebook page was folded into CAP Action's. CAP also agreed not to put the ThinkProgress name on its own work.

That guarantee expired three and a half years ago. The site is still running, on WordPress 5.3.2, a version that stopped receiving security patches well before the deadline it was promised until. Somebody there has quietly kept paying for a server that publishes nothing, past the date they committed to and past the point where anyone is checking. It is a better ending than the redirect most dead publications get, and it was not announced either.

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