We’re gliding toward the end of a long week here at TPM HQ. And in one of our free-ranging all-staff skype bull sessions I mentioned something I’d hardly remembered, which is that not long before I started TPM during the November 2000 Florida recount, I’d actually briefly did a sort of proto-TPM on the website of my then employer, The American Prospect.
I guess maybe Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal TPM.
I only had a hazy recollection of it and hadn’t thought about it in ages. But through the magic of the Internets Andrew Golis pulled it up in seconds on the Internet Archive. This appears to be the first post, from August 10, 2000. I’d forgotten how similar it looked to the original TPM site and even the name (“Washington Memo”) was pretty similar.
In any case, I only hazily remember it. My only real memory is why I stopped. I remember starting to get calls from HQ up in Boston (I was the Washington Editor at the time) with various complaints about how what I was writing was too edgy or unprofessional or funny or I guess just too interesting. So I figured WTF and basically just stopped. Later, after I started real TPM, they started picking it up back on the Prospect site in a sort expurgated, lam-ized edition. But not long after that I was on my own.
