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 2011. 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, now heads (together with Pitney) More Perfect Union, a labor-focused news outlet that he describes 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
Impact on mainstream press
ThinkProgress reports drew comment from news outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and CNN. For example, Times reporter Ian Urbina, in his coverage of hostility in the health care reform debate, cited a 2009 ThinkProgress report by Lee Fang on a Tea Party Patriots strategy memo advocating disrupting town hall meetings of Democratic members of Congress.
After the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in 2010, ThinkProgress reported on the safety record of mine owner Massey Energy, finding over $2.2 million in fines levied by the Mine Safety and Health Administration against Massey for more than 3,000 safety violations; Times reporter Tom Zeller Jr. cited the figures in the Timess coverage of Massey's safety record. In 2013, ThinkProgress posted a video of Pam Simon, a staffer for Representative Gabby Giffords, who was shot alongside Giffords in 2011, confronting Senator Kelly Ayotte regarding Ayotte's opposition to closing the gun show loophole; the Times cited the video in a report on gun control activism among gun violence victims. In a 2015 op-ed in the Times, Charles M. Blow excerpted ThinkProgress research on gender in chief executive officer hiring. The same year, Blow excerpted ThinkProgress research on the effectiveness of drug screening of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients in an analysis of the political rhetoric of poverty.