Joshua Micah Jesajan-Dorja Marshall (born February 15, 1969) is an American journalist and blogger who founded Talking Points Memo. A liberal, he presides over a network of progressive-oriented sites that operate under the TPM Media banner. In 2008, they averaged 400,000 page views on weekdays and 750,000 unique visitors per month.

Marshall and his work have been profiled by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, National Public Radio, The New York Times Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, and GQ. In 2007, Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor at The New Yorker, compared Marshall to the influential founders of Time magazine, saying: "Marshall is in the line of the great light-bulb-over-the-head editors. He's like Briton Hadden or Henry Luce. He's created something new."

He is a graduate of the Webb Schools of California and Princeton University and earned a PhD in American history from Brown University. Talking Points Memo experienced the largest surge in traffic, growing from 32,000 unique visitors in September 2007 to 458,000 unique visitors in September 2008, a 1,321% year-to-year increase in the size of its audience.

Launching TPM Media

In 2005, Marshall launched TPMCafe. This site features a collection of blogs about a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues written by academics, journalists and former public officials among others.

Marshall expanded his operation again in 2006, launching TPMmuckraker. The site focuses on political corruption, and was originally staffed by Paul Kiel and Justin Rood. Rood has since moved on to ABC and its blog The Blotter. Kiel has recently been joined by two new staff reporter-bloggers, Laura McGann and Spencer Ackerman. TPMmuckraker has attempted to organize its readers to plow through and read document dumps by governmental entities engaging in cover-ups.

TPM Media operates out of an office in Manhattan and currently employs seven reporters, including two in Washington. Marshall discovered that U.S. Attorney Carol Lam was also being asked to resign. Lam had successfully prosecuted Republican California Representative Duke Cunningham on bribery charges and was amid a criminal investigation into a congressional scandal of historic proportions. By the time The New York Times first reported on Lam's firing (on page 17), Marshall and his news sites had already posted 15 articles on the story.

For doggedly pursuing the story, Arianna Huffington nominated Joshua Marshall and the Talking Points Memo team to the Time 100.

Personal life

Marshall married Millet Israeli in March 2005, and the couple live in New York City with their sons Sam and Daniel.

Prizes and honors

  • George Polk Award for Legal Reporting, 2007
  • The Week Opinion Awards, Blogger of the Year, 2003 & 2007
  • GQ Men of the Year, Muckraker, 2007

References

  • Talking Points Memo
  • Marshall's biography at Talking Points Memo.
  • Video discussion/debate with Marshall and David Corn on Bloggingheads.tv
  • Video discussion/debate with Marshall and Mickey Kaus on Bloggingheads.tv
  • C-SPAN Q&A interview with Marshall, February 12, 2012