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Welcome To The New ThinkProgress

You might notice that ThinkProgress looks a bit different. We have a brand new logo and are also on a brand new publishing platform, Medium.

Why Medium?

In 2005, ThinkProgress launched on WordPress. At the time, this was an innovative and somewhat unusual choice. WordPress was new and open source.

For many years, WordPress served us very well. ThinkProgress’ audience grew exponentially, our reporting deepened, and our website evolved at a reasonable clip to meet the needs of the emerging social media era.

The original ThinkProgress banner, circa 2005
The original ThinkProgress banner, circa 2005

But times have changed. The relationship between publishers and readers has also changed. No longer do most readers navigate directly to ThinkProgress through a desktop computer. Rather, readers find your site through search and social media and each of those platforms, in turn, are developing their own protocols to optimize content. Meanwhile, everyone is accessing content from a variety of devices and data networks, putting a heavy premium on speed and adaptability.

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It’s become too much for ThinkProgress — a non-profit publisher with limited technical resources — to keep up with.

Enter Medium. They are going to provide ThinkProgress with a cutting edge publishing platform that we don’t have to worry about. And they are going to keep making it better. Medium is invested in publishers like ThinkProgress and will give us input on how the platform is developed moving forward.

Medium lands biggest website yet“It’s really impossible for an independent publisher to develop and maintain their own publishing platform in this…money.cnn.comMeanwhile, we’ll be able to focus on what we do well — publishing rigorous reporting and analysis about things that matter. We’ll be fair but unbalanced, giving you the facts while avoiding false equivalencies.

What changes for me?

If you want, nothing. You can just continue reading and enjoying ThinkProgress as normal.

Now that our site is on Medium, the only difference is that you’ll have a better experience. Our content will load faster and look better. And we’ll have better tools that will allow us to tell our stories more powerfully.

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But I’d encourage you to sign up for a Medium account. It’s a great way to keep up not only with ThinkProgress but also with other great publications like Pacific Standard, The Ringer, and The Awl.

It will also allow you interact with ThinkProgress content in a few ways:

  1. Recommend ThinkProgress content. Clicking the heart at the bottom of the post means that the article will reach more people.

2. Highlight ThinkProgress content. Highlighting is a unique feature to Medium. People you are connected to on Medium will see what you’ve highlighted.

With a Medium account, you can choose to use the platform to publish your own thoughts and articles with the same professional tools that we’ll be using at ThinkProgress.

Or you can just keep reading!

We want to hear from you

This was a big project. We ended up migrating over 100,000 posts to Medium. We did it for us but we also did it for you, the reader. We want to improve your experience at ThinkProgress.

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So if you have any thoughts about the new site, good or bad, please send them my way. You can reach me on Twitter or send me an email.

Special thanks to Erich Nagler from the Medium design team, who helped us develop our new visual identity. Also thanks to Saul Carlin, Julia Tsyvin, Amy Quispe, Lilly Oh, Shitij Agarwal and all of the other folks at Medium who helped make this possible.