Josh Marshall

Based in New York, NY

Org Talking Points Memo (TPM Media LLC)

Role Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Notable work and positions

Talking Points Memo (TPM) — Founder and Editor-in-Chief
The American Prospect — Former Associate Editor (1997–1999) and Washington Editor (1999–2001)

Biography

Josh Marshall is the founder and editor-in-chief of Talking Points Memo (TPM), the independent political news organization he began writing in November 2000 as a personal blog on the disputed Florida presidential election recount. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1969, he attended the Webb Schools in Claremont, California, before arriving at Princeton University in 1987, where he majored in history, wrote his senior thesis on the nullification debate in early-19th-century Virginia under adviser Daniel Rodgers, and graduated with the Class of 1991. He then began a doctoral program in American history at Brown University, researching relations between Indigenous nations and English settlers in 17th-century New England, while supporting himself in the mid-1990s by designing websites for law firms and publishing an online newsletter on internet law. In 1997 and 1998 he freelanced articles on internet free speech for the online publication Feed and for The American Prospect, which soon hired him as an associate editor; in 1999, after the magazine received a $5.5 million expansion grant, he became its Washington editor and relocated to Washington, D.C. He completed his Brown doctorate in 2003, years after setting aside an academic career.

Marshall began writing Talking Points Memo in November 2000, in loose imitation of early political bloggers Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, and left the Prospect in early 2001 to freelance while continuing the blog. Reader tips helped him build a 2002 story on then–Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's remarks praising Strom Thurmond's segregationist 1948 presidential campaign, a controversy that contributed to Lott's resignation from Senate leadership and pushed TPM's daily readership from roughly 8,000 to 20,000 page views. TPM began selling advertising through Blogads in 2003 and, aided by reader pledge drives, launched TPM Café and TPM Muckraker in 2005. In 2007, TPM's investigation into the Bush administration's dismissal of United States attorneys for allegedly political reasons contributed to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and won TPM the George Polk Award for Legal Reporting — the first time a web-native news organization received the honor. TPM opened a Washington, D.C. bureau in the fall of 2009.

Marshall is married to Millet Israeli, a Princeton classmate (Class of 1992) and former Dow Jones lawyer who has worked on TPM's business side; the couple have two sons. Headquartered in New York City, TPM has never taken outside investment capital and has grown into a fully member-funded newsroom: as of a January 2026 interview, more than 91 percent of its revenue came from reader memberships and contributions, funding an editorial staff represented by the Writers Guild of America - East. Marshall continues to write for TPM's Editors' Blog and hosts The Josh Marshall Podcast.

Career highlights

1. George Polk Award for Legal Reporting, 2007 Long Island University · Recognized for TPM's reporting tracing a pattern of U.S. attorneys removed from office for resisting political pressure from the Bush administration — the first George Polk Award given to a web-native news organization.

2. GQ Men of the Year, “Muckraker,” 2007 Named to GQ's annual Men of the Year list for founding and running Talking Points Memo.

3. TPM's 25th anniversary, 2025–2026 Marked a quarter-century of continuous, independent publication in November 2025, having outlasted many digital-media peers of its era by declining outside investment and building a reader-membership revenue model that now supplies more than 91 percent of TPM's income.

Talking Points Memo
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