ThinkProgress

ThinkProgress was an American progressive news website that was active from 2005¹ to 2019. It was a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action), a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization. Founded by Judd Legum in 2005, the site's reports were regularly discussed by mainstream news outlets and peer-reviewed academic journals. ThinkProgress also hosted a climate section called Climate Progress, which was founded by Joe Romm. In 2019, after financial losses, CAP Action unsuccessfully sought a new publisher for the site. No new content has been added since September 2019, rendering ThinkProgress effectively defunct.

ThinkProgress was an American progressive news website that was active from 2005 to 2019. It was a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action), a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization. Founded by Judd Legum in 2005, the site's reports were regularly discussed by mainstream news outlets and peer-reviewed academic journals. ThinkProgress also hosted a climate section called Climate Progress, which was founded by Joe Romm. In 2019, after financial losses, CAP Action unsuccessfully sought a new publisher for the site. No new content has been added since September 2019, rendering ThinkProgress effectively defunct. ==History== ThinkProgress was founded in 2005 by Judd Legum, a lawyer, who ran the site until he left in 2007. Faiz Shakir edited the site from 2007 until 2012, when Legum returned as editor-in-chief. Legum left the site again in 2018. ThinkProgress described itself as "editorially independent" of the Center for American Progress (CAP) and CAP Action. In its early years, ThinkProgress included a daily newsletter that contained a recap and analysis of major political news and the blog Wonk Room, which was published until 2011¹. In that year, the site was redesigned to offer sections organized by subject matter, and other CAP Action blogs were consolidated into the site. The site was then divided into sections covering climate, economy, health, justice, LGBT, world, culture, sports, politics and features. In 2017, the site's organization returned to a less segmented presentation. ThinkProgress had a staff of five in 2006 and 42 in 2017. In 2015, the staff of ThinkProgress unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East. Previous staffers who went on to write for other media outlets include Alyssa Rosenberg and Andrea Peterson, who joined The Washington Post; Matthew Yglesias, who moved to Slate and Vox; Zaid Jilani, who writes for The Intercept; and Nico Pitney and Amanda Terkel, who joined The Huffington Post. Shakir, who led the 2020 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, later headed (together with Pitney) More Perfect Union, a labor-focused news outlet that he described as "ThinkProgress for a digital age." ThinkProgress 's climate section, Climate Progress, was founded by climate scientist Joseph J. Romm. The section discussed climate and energy, political news related to climate change, and responses to climate change by the media. In November 2016 ThinkProgress launched a "Trump Investigation Fund" crowdfunding effort. In 2017, Michael Goldfarb, founder of the conservative newspaper The Washington Free Beacon and its parent company, the Center for American Freedom, said he modeled them on ThinkProgress and CAP. ===Closure=== In mid-2019, after the site had experienced declining revenue, traffic and donations, CAP put ThinkProgress up for sale. No buyer was found. A plan to make ThinkProgress the institutional blog of the Center for American Progress was abandoned, and publication on the site ended on September 5, 2019. ==Reporting== ===Climate Progress=== After his 2011 Climate Progress report identifying food insecurity as "the biggest impact that climate change is likely to have on most people for most of this century", the journal Nature invited Romm to write a commentary on desertification. In a 2016 article in The New York Times, Andrew Revkin recommended Romm's assessment in Climate Progress of the prospects for the climate and the environment under newly elected President Trump. Andrew Leonard in Salon, John Rennie of the Public Library of Science and Jim Naureckas of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting cited a 2010 Climate Progress report in their critiques of an online poll regarding attitudes toward climate change conducted by Scientific American magazine. ==Reception== ThinkProgress had about 100,000 visitors per day in 2006, 6 million unique visitors and 14 million page views in March 2014, and 8 to 10 million unique page views per month in 2017. In 2017, Lifewire ranked ThinkProgress among the ten most popular news blogs on the Internet. According to CAP, the site received "more than 12 million pageviews and 7.5 million unique visitors in June 2019". In 2008, Time magazine named Climate Progress one of the "Top 15 Green Websites," saying that Climate Progress "counters bad science and inane rhetoric with original analysis." In 2009, Thomas Friedman, in his column in The New York Times, called Climate Progress "indispensable." In 2010 Time included Climate Progress in a list of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010", saying Climate Progress was one of "the blogs we can't live without." In 2010, UK's The Guardian included Climate Progress on its list of "Top 50 Twitter climate accounts to follow", saying Climate Progress was one of "the key people and organisations you should be following on Twitter if you're interested in climate change." In 2015 Tim Ward wrote in HuffPost that Climate Progress "has been the best available source of climate-change news for several years." ==Notes== ==References== ==External links== 10 Years of ThinkProgress and the Future of Digital Media (2015 panel discussion)

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1377621280 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.