Talking Points Memo contemplates opening the kimono – for members only

Laura Hazard Owen of Neiman Lab has done an interesting interview with Josh Marshall of Talking Point Memo, in which he discusses the idea of putting some member-only content behind a paywall. But that content won’t be the liberal-centric reporting the site is best known for: it’ll be a glimpse behind the scenes of the website::

That is where we come up with giving people more detail, more transparency, more guidance in understanding the stories of the day and our reporting, as the the key thing we want to focus in on. One of the possibilities was what I discussed in that post: having short editor explainers of the status of a story at a given moment.

This is interesting to me, simply because it is an old idea — certainly it was something that was widely discussed as blogging opened up journalism in the mid-2000s — that got forgotten. The fact that some smart businesses are coming back to the idea of connecting directly with their readers, of engaging with their core readers, suggests that we might finally have got the hang of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.