The Paesanos Podcast

Sean Lukasik:
Tara McGowan, thanks so much for joining me on the Paesanos Podcast. I've been looking forward to this conversation and I'm really glad to have you on.

Tara:
Thanks for having me, Sean. It's great to be here. It's great to meet you.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah, you too! So one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you and have you on is, is because of all the work that you've done over the past five to 10 years and its connection to digital strategy and basically, you know, building business, building a political campaign on the internet. And so you have a lot of experience with internet culture and all the ins and outs of it. And I guess I want to start with just a little bit of background in understanding how you set out to start first acronym and then courier based on what you experienced with the Obama campaign.

Tara:
Sure, that's a great question. So I started acronym, which was a nonprofit advocacy organization right after the 2016 presidential election. And at least half the country was reeling from the results of that election. And I had been a journalist very early on in my career, and then I made the pivot into politics after covering the 08 election. And So I had worked my way up pretty quickly in progressive politics and advocacy work as a digital strategist, which I never set out to be, but as a millennial, I was a digital native. And so kind of all my communications and storytelling experience was really directed on the internet. And I ran a very large digital advertising program in the 2016 presidential election to support Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump. course, obviously, was not enough to get us over the finish line, but it was a very, very eye-opening experience. I worked for a super PAC called Priorities. And so as a super PAC, we legally could not coordinate with Hillary Clinton campaign, right, which is a blessing and a curse, but it's for good legal reasons. But one of the benefits of it was that we just had to be scrappier. than the campaign, right? The campaign had a digital team of, I think, over 200, like the one I had been on Obama's campaign a number of years earlier. And so it also meant that I developed closer relationships with the folks at the platforms that we were leveraging in my program like Facebook and Google and YouTube. And everything is relationship driven. I know we're gonna talk about that. And those relationships really gave me deeper insight into what the Trump campaign was doing too, because some of these folks were the same people. that were working on both and they weren't sharing anything they weren't able to share, but I'm somebody who really works primarily off of instincts. I think I have strong political and communication instincts, but also I think sometimes we rely too much on data. I think data is really important to inform decision making, but isn't the decision itself in the data. And so I just, I had both data and instincts that we were just not. playing at the level in terms of reaching and communicating with voters. And I was very, very concerned about Trump's ability to win more so than a lot of my colleagues at the time in the lead up to the election because of those relationships and that insight

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
that I had. And so I became one of a few folks that really got brought into a lot of rooms after that election to be able to try to make sense of what happened. And the lane, of course, I was obsessed with and was able to provide some insight and value on was how the Trump campaign and the Republican Party had really kind of leapfrogged Democrats in terms of their understanding and leveraging of social media, especially Trump. He really, he didn't know if he had supporters in this country or what they would look like, right? And he used Facebook to really build his movement and learn what people responded to and do more of it very effectively. and also used it to build a massive war chest among everything else. And so, and Democrats were still largely using it just as sort of a one-way communication and fundraising platform. And so the platforms were evolving really quickly and a lot of our infrastructure wasn't really set up to evolve as quickly. And it made me very, very focused on one piece of sort of the Democratic Party and progressive movement apparatus, our deep reliance on consultants. And every industry has them and agencies that we rely on and especially the political world really relies on them because it's cyclical, right? And so you can't really sustain full-time careers in this work, you're hopping from campaign to campaign and campaigns are massive startups that have to. start quickly and then they dissolve. Like their whole purpose is to win or lose in a zero sum game and then go away. And so consultants are the ones that really are the consistent factors that drive communication strategy and paid advertising and a lot of decisions around a campaign. And yet, because of that very nature of the business model of agencies and consultants. they're not incentivized to experiment or evolve very quickly, right? And so it creates this inertia where you just keep doing what you know how to do or what is scalable as a product you can sell. And for Democrats, that really meant television advertising and just not enough R&D. And so technology and social media was evolving so much more quickly than our playbook. And I felt in the position I had been in that I saw that pretty intimately and I really wanted to create. an organization that was not incentivized by profit, like consultancies or agencies, but was instead, like a campaign, incentivized about learning and ultimately being able to win elections and build power. And my theory on the case of that was that it had to be nonprofit, so those incentives were aligned. It could not be a for-profit entity. And I had read Dark Money by Jane Mayer.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
and had been very inspired by what the Koch brothers had built on the other side in terms of lasting infrastructure that lived and existed outside of the Republican Party. So they had both autonomy, but also had real infrastructure, and it wasn't reliant on the party or the party committees or campaigns. And so acronym was sort of the culmination of that experience and those insights. And so it was a 501c4 organization that had nested under it three for-profit companies. So we were able to be able to maximize building infrastructure and leveraging capital in smart ways. But again, no one was getting rich off of it. So our mission wasn't steered by what would make us money.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
It was it was really driven by how are we going to level up the entire movement and be able to ultimately build more political power. And and we had a super PAC as well playfully called PACRONOM.

Sean Lukasik:
Bye.

Tara:
And we really focused on just layering in a lot of experimentation and testing and creativity into how do we reach more people in more authentic ways leveraging the internet and social media, and not doing it with the constraints that political campaigns or candidates really have to be more risk-averse. I am a more risk-inclined person and I wanted an apparatus that would allow us to really take risks and be okay with failures and we had plenty of them.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
But ultimately we ended up being the biggest independent expenditure for digital against Trump in the 2020 election, among many other programs. And I'm sorry I'm so long winded.

Sean Lukasik:
No.

Tara:
One of the companies that we started at acronym that now is my full-time job at running, because I've spun it out since, is Courier. And Courier is a network of left leaning local newsrooms in battleground states across the country. less politically engaged Americans who share popular values.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
And popular values are values that more than 50% of this country support, like access to abortion, increased gun control measures, action on climate change and support the clean energy transition, LGBTQ plus and other human rights. These are things that the vast majority of Americans support, but have been really depicted by legacy media and the right wing as progressive or liberal issues,

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
or frankly partisan issues, which I don't actually believe they are, but the messaging ecosystem we live in and certainly the power of the right wing media has influenced that to our disadvantage. So we reach tens of millions of Americans in critical electoral states every day. where they get their information on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and email newsletters. We don't drive them to websites because they don't read articles. Most people don't. I am a very high informed, politically active individual and

Sean Lukasik:
and stay

Tara:
I

Sean Lukasik:
still.

Tara:
am informed by skimming my news feeds every day.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
So, you know, it's really about how do we just continue to meet people where they are and we're gonna continue to change our consumption habits and where we go to for information and who we trust and we just have to be more nimble than. our party or our movement infrastructure was really set up to let us be.

Sean Lukasik:
Well, I'm listening to that story and feeling the anxiety of the position that you were in 2016, trying to build the plane on the way down and seeing not only what the other side is doing, but seeing what effects you could be having and seeing the difference that you could be making and knowing that the infrastructure isn't quite there. So... Thank you and kudos to you for going back and building it the right way then and getting it up and off the ground. I can tell you that I appreciate that work. And is there any possibility that courier will end up in states that are not battleground states? Do you see it growing beyond that? And this is just kind of where you're starting.

Tara:
Yes, absolutely. And also, I think a lot of folks would argue some of the states, we have newsrooms and stuff on the ground and are no longer parallel ground states, unfortunately. But we are determined to make them that way again.

Sean Lukasik:
Yes.

Tara:
I include Iowa and Florida in that mix. We have newsrooms in both of those states. And the way that we designed Courier was very intentionally to be scalable. So there was a local news crisis in America. Over 2,500 local news publishers have closed entirely. There are local news deserts all over this country. It's only getting worse. And there's a direct correlation between access to local news and civic participation. So this is a really dire crisis for our democracy. There are a lot of really, really fast growing and well-resourced efforts to address it that I'm very, very supportive of and encouraged by. And yet many of these efforts are not. really thinking about how to rebuild local news in a way that does meet audiences where they

Sean Lukasik:
Mm.

Tara:
are. And that's really what we've done at Courier. And so one example of that is that there's a lot of resources going to very small, independent, local and hyper-local media companies and startups and news organizations. But the challenge there is that the reporter who wants to start that, right? Who has that experience to really source and report the news, they also then are responsible for list acquisition, building a list, audience acquisition and growth, audience retention, paying attention to the data to understand what their audience engages with and what content they want and need, and also revenue, because they can't stick around. And so, we only acquired one newsroom so far, every other newsroom of our nine that exists, we started from the ground up, but we acquired one called Iowa Starting Line in Iowa, really reputable progressive news organization. And part of the reason we acquired them is because Pat Reinhart, the founder, who's now our national political editor, he couldn't make ends meet. He was doing it all. And that is what's happening in these small news organizations. And so we built Courier. So the reporters on the ground in our states are only responsible for reporting and publishing their news and content and developing sources and relationships and being the trusted messengers on social media to the community. We're really making them social influencers in their own right. That is only possible because we built a scalable infrastructure at the HQ level. So we take care of everything from audience acquisition and targeting and data analytics and measurement and revenue and underwriting and partnership development at the national level. So that means we can go and be everywhere.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
It's always just resource to pay. So

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
we just launched our ninth newsroom in Nevada, the Nevada last week, and we have our 10th and 11th launching later this year in New Hampshire and Texas. And that's really only because people have seen our model. They've said, we want what you have in Michigan with the gander or the Keystone in Pennsylvania. We want that in our state. We want to be able to increase civic participation here. And so they partners on the ground and individuals work with us to be able to raise the resources to bring. that. So if folks are ever listening to your podcast, who want us in their state, we just have to figure out a way to be able to have the resources. So we never want to create a newsroom that then has to shut down because we haven't

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
built in that sustainability from day one.

Sean Lukasik:
Well, sign me up to be on that list for sure. I'm in upstate New York and I think if you lopped off downstate in New York City, this would be a battleground if not a pretty red part of the country. So it's interesting to think about. I kind of struggled with how to ask this next question and maybe you answered it a little bit already, but when in 2021, you thought about starting. a media company in the current landscape, the post Trump era, the post COVID era. You had an advantage over every other well established media company out there that was trying to pivot from a brand that they'd established over decades and didn't have the luxury of just wiping it all out and starting from scratch. So with that luxury, what did you feel was essential building a media company from the ground up? in 2021 to have and what sort of possibilities did you set out to solve or discover through that process?

Tara:
That's a great question. So just one minor amendment is that we started Courier in 2019.

Sean Lukasik:
Oh, I'm sorry.

Tara:
No, no, you're fine. But we incubated it out of acronym. And so what we did when I made the decision after the Georgia runoff in January of 2020, which folks will remember, the wonderful results were the morning of January 6. That day

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
ended with the horror of the insurrection.

Sean Lukasik:
It feels

Tara:
I did.

Sean Lukasik:
like

Tara:
Yeah.

Sean Lukasik:
it hasn't ended yet, actually.

Tara:
I had not gotten off the treadmill of waking up every day thinking about how to get rid of Donald Trump since

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
early 2015. So I was like, where did my 30s go? At this point in time, so I did some soul searching. I talked to a lot of my mentors, including David Plath, who was on my board and is a good friend. And I made the decision at that point that I really felt that courier was the most effective and potentially game changing thing that I had helped create. and that it needed my dedicated time and resources and energy to scale it. And so that is when I made the decision to spin it out and wind down acronym in 2021. Sorry, it was January of 2021, obviously, the runoff and the instruction. So, courier is actually over four years old now, but we did start a parent company that acquired it called Good Information in 2021. So that was just one quick little thing because I wanna make sure I'm always accurate, but.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah, thank you.

Tara:
But it's still, the question is still an excellent one. So, because there are great advantages to starting something from scratch in today's incredibly decentralized and fractured media ecosystem. We know this not only from what I described about the local news crisis, but digital media brands that had huge evaluations even just four or five years ago, we're talking about. Vice and Box and Mike, if folks remember that, they've imploded. There is not a sustainable business model right now for good information media publishers in America. I am a strong believer that it is going to forevermore be a hybrid model of philanthropic contributions, as well as traditional and new advertising revenue streams. because anyone who works in media or news is struggling and does not really know. Like we are in the middle of an existential crisis in this industry. And so there are great advantages from starting from scratch. I often joke with donors and colleagues that I have absolutely no interest in acquiring legacy or traditional or terrestrial

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
media like radio and print because it's gonna cost so much time and money to retrofit them. So I like being in the digital lane, but... but that work is important too. And so there are disadvantages though, because the most important thing, especially when you are a news publisher is trust, building trust. It is

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
not an easy thing to do. It's an increasingly crowded and noisy ecosystem. Everyone self-selects where they get their information or they passively get it in terms of what finds them through the algorithms and through targeting. And so That's something we take very seriously. I would say that's a disadvantage and it just means it's harder.

Sean Lukasik:
Thank

Tara:
You have to

Sean Lukasik:
you.

Tara:
work a lot harder to develop an audience's trust and loyalty. Where brands like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have that and they're able to withstand that and grow. But when you're thinking about starting something of this nature, you just need to, I think the biggest piece of it is to intentionally design your company to be new. to not rely on any one type of content product or distribution channel. We are nowhere near the end of the disruption that is going to happen and the decentralization. The generational divides are getting more and more vast when it comes to how we consume information, when it comes to internet culture, when it comes to the silos, the information silos and the echo chambers we all live in. The cool part about that is it's the most democratic media ecosystem you could ever imagine, right?

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
It's not like there are a few blessed, you know, white cis male communicators who, you know, a lot of people miss the days of Edward Murrow or Walter Krunk, et cetera.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
And a lot of disenfranchised communities would say that, you know, there was a lot of information and storytelling that was not getting to most people. So there's something really beautiful about what the internet and social media has done for... democratizing information, but it's also incredibly fraught, as we know, because it means that it is very porous and there is a lot of, there's just lack of accountability or regulation writ large, and so there's a lot of bad information and malicious information that is

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
done. So I do think that being able to build a media company that knows exactly what audience they want to communicate with and that tailors their products to them, but stays nimble so they can always go where that... that audience migrates to on new platforms is just key. It's really important. And when you look at how traditional media, like newspapers and even like digital local media have fallen apart, it's because they were built to rely exclusively on one form of distribution and one form of revenue. And so they could not sustain the changing environmental factors and industry factors that ultimately led to their demise. So I don't have a perfect answer because

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
nothing's foolproof, but you really do need to be a lot more nimble and just stay where you commit is the audience that

Sean Lukasik:
Sure.

Tara:
you want to build trust with.

Sean Lukasik:
Well, and you said earlier, you like to move forward based on instincts as much as data or sometimes more so. What's the data telling you right now? I mean, working in the digital space, I know that there is way too much data and there can be way too much analysis of every little thing that goes out, whether it's a single social media post, a single ad, or an entire website, an entire blog. What's the data telling you in terms of what's... coming up and what are your instincts telling you?

Tara:
And you're not talking about messaging, from a messaging standpoint, right? It's much more of sort of like a distribution and kind

Sean Lukasik:
Right.

Tara:
of a

Sean Lukasik:
Well,

Tara:
project.

Sean Lukasik:
you're talking

Tara:
Yeah.

Sean Lukasik:
about this existential crisis that media companies are facing and, um, you know, they're, they're dying off and even some of the big brands cannot figure it out. So, um, you know, you're, you're feeling it out again as you go, which of course you're used to, as you told us earlier, but, um, but yeah, where's, where, where do you see courier going in the next few years?

Tara:
Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that we have noticed from the data that has informed our decision to invest much more heavily in this area is TikTok. So all of our newsrooms now have a TikTok presence. We have trained and coached all of our political reporters to be on-air correspondents, essentially, to be. social influencers that break down the news and they're reporting on TikTok in TikTok ways, if you will, in very native ways. You have to be pithy, you have to be creative, you have to give your personality, this is how you build trust. And our TikTok growth, which cannot be paid or targeted the way we can do on other platforms, it is purely organic because it's an open, a real open algorithm, has been really incredible and we think that's happening for a few reasons. One, Gen Z is the largest generational audience on TikTok that overindexes on engagement and time spent there. And they are much more politically engaged and civically engaged. And so our political reporting there does better than on any other platform or in fact on Facebook or newsletters, it's the inverse. It's the non-political local community and lifestyle reporting our teams do. The other factor is that we believe that there is less competition for geographically based content. And so that also rewards our reporters and our content on the platform. And so something that we've thought a lot about is, you know, TikTok might not be around. We know it's very controversial. We know that there are threats of a ban, which I personally don't agree with. I think we just need regulation of all these platforms. And it's not going away. And we are very much a you need to go where audiences are. But it could change. The audiences could go to another platform very quickly. This stuff can change overnight almost, as we know

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
what's happening with Twitter at slash X. And so the thing that we know to be true, at least for the foreseeable future, is that email is not going anywhere for older generations, and I include myself,

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
in that population. And these things, our smartphones, are not going away anytime soon. And so something that we want to invest more in is SMS. text message alerts

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
and communications to younger generations in particular, because that's the way where we're going to be able to build a direct relationship with them, whether they stay on TikTok or move on, so we can continue to engage them with good news and information wherever they go, the way that we do with our older audiences via our email newsletters. So direct distribution, direct relationships is the most valuable thing that you can have as a media company. It demonstrates trust and loyalty. It allows you to keep that relationship regardless of migration from platforms. And of course, the most important for most media companies is it's a revenue driver, right? That you can then monetize your owned communications via email or other things that you can't do on social media in a lot of ways.

Sean Lukasik:
How's your own use of the internet evolved as we're talking? I mean, we had a quick eye roll conversation before we started recording about Twitter slash X and whatever's going on there. And it's, it's a weird place to be right now. But there's also an audience there still. And I know that I'm spending less time there, but I'm not necessarily making it up in new places. You know, I thought threads might replace that a little bit, but it really hasn't so far. And I wonder for you, how's your internet use evolved and where are you going to get the new, what's your timeline for these news headlines?

Tara:
Yeah, it is. We are in such an interesting moment. So, you know, I like most people, you know, I am college educated, I work in, have worked in national politics and media, like I would describe, people would describe me as elite, right? And I'm, I, you know, that's, stinks, but it's true. And so you gotta own what you are.

Sean Lukasik:
I would agree

Tara:
And

Sean Lukasik:
with

Tara:
I

Sean Lukasik:
that,

Tara:
am,

Sean Lukasik:
Sarah.

Tara:
and I'm a forward journalist. I'm a high information consumer. So I have a very proactive information diet, even though I'm a Axios AM every morning and I listen to morning edition on NPR every morning and from my local NPR WRNI here in Rhode Island and I have my sources of good information and local and national reporting that I rely on. I still read the Sunday New York Times paper edition because that's just something I've carried on from J-School that I know pretty much everyone younger than me will never experience, which makes me sad, but it's true. And I was very active on Twitter. That's where I had my biggest social audience. And it was very, very powerful and useful in a lot of ways. And I am still on it at TowerEMcG, but I am definitely on it less. And what I wanna say that is somewhat complicated is that I have a- lot and have always had a lot of concerns and criticism about Twitter and the Twitterverse and how unfairly powerful it was at influencing the influencers and the national conversation and how many powerful communicators became so addicted to it and reliant on it that it actually increased nepotism and increased these sort of elite information silos and understanding of the platform

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
and we're not getting their information there. And so I think Elon Musk might have agreed with that. I think he made it his intention to blow this up for political and personal and just ego-driven reasons no one will ever understand, nor do I ever want to try to. So I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing when Twitter dies. I also do think it will be replaced for this kind of community because they are so hungry for it and did become so reliant on it. And there was real value extracted from it for a lot of individuals. I do think Threads is the one that is most likely to become that platform. And I think the, uh, the challenge has been not having a desktop version for these folks that sit all day and tweeted all day.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
And that was like how they built sources or, you know, drove marketing of their work. Um, so now that change, I think is actually happening this week or next week. It's imminent. They released it. Then I think that we'll see, um, more folks, including myself, spend more time on threads. Um, but. Generally, it kind of goes to the other point I was making, is like, we can't, I don't think that like, you know, I think that we should all be like dating a lot of different platforms and not marrying any of them because no one knows where it's gonna go. And there aren't sustainable business models for a lot of this. It's interesting, I'm just

Sean Lukasik:
It's interesting.

Tara:
thinking

Sean Lukasik:
And

Tara:
of

Sean Lukasik:
I'm just thinking

Tara:
it. Like,

Sean Lukasik:
out

Tara:
you

Sean Lukasik:
loud,

Tara:
know,

Sean Lukasik:
you know,

Tara:
think.

Sean Lukasik:
and thinking while you're talking about the fact that Twitter has always been a landscape of, of takes and reactions to the headlines, as opposed to going to Axios or to the New York times app where you're seeing the articles and yeah, sure. There are comment sections and things, but that's not really where the discourse is happening. Um, and I wonder if there's some advantage to not going to a place where it's just interpretation of the news. Um, and actually getting the news and then being able to have conversations about it. Uh, if people still do that in real life, but, um, but yeah, you've got me thinking out loud about, you know, what, what I miss and don't miss about what Twitter used to be. Um, and that's really interesting to think, um, think about how that gets rebuilt. If, if that's the intention with a platform like tre, uh, threads or, um, or another one that might be out there.

Tara:
That's right. And we're also the other point that I'd make is like we are in a content creator economy now. And you know, everything from really talented, you know, investigative reporters or political journalists leaving establishments like the New York Times or Politico to become sub stack writers and making more money than they ever would on payroll at those and but communicating to a much smaller niche audience like to the disruption in the Advertising dollars that used to go to traditional types of ads via television radio, etc are now going to influencers who cultivated large trusted audiences through their personalities. And so we're seeing that transition in politics too and in news, as I mentioned, like we develop our reporters to be talent.

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
And that's the other thing that I don't think is ever going to go away given human nature and media, regardless of how we consume it, is it's personality. People are

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
what build trust and engagement and authenticity. And so the right wing has established this incredible bench of non-candidate or elected officials who drive their messaging. Everyone from Tucker Carlson to Ben Shapiro and Candice Owens to people that claim not to be right wing like Joe Rogan, but have massive audiences and influence. And so I also think in the context of where media is today and where it is going. investing in people and individuals who are transparent about where they come from, whatever their belief system is, et cetera, and have real ability to connect with people in formats like this, right?

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
From their homes and from their iPhones and their Androids, that is really media.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
And it's, you know, it's fraught because these are not folks who are necessarily trained journalists or other things, but... It is what it is, and so we need to leverage it for good, and we need to make sure that there are very, very good actors that are building these trusted audiences and informing larger audiences from a non-partisan perspective, as well as a very explicitly valued strip.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah. Um, I recently listened to your conversation with Anthony Davis on his podcast, the weekend show, and I absolutely loved that conversation. And I would encourage anybody listening to this to go check that out. That was, that was such a great conversation, a great episode. Um, and there, there were a couple of things that you touched on in that, that I just wanted to maybe like extract from a little bit more for the purpose of this podcast. One of the things you talked about was this. idea of political doxing and how there have been really dangerous moments as a result of these internet mobs getting people to take action to visit the house, for example, of Paul Pelosi. And, of course, you know, we saw January six, we already talked about that. And another thing that you touched on in that conversation was that we're seeing a lot more of for engagement because the internet is the place to get numbers and to see data that we're seeing stunts and press conferences and props and things that we hadn't seen before for the purpose of engagement, to play to this internet audience. So those were two things that you mentioned in that conversation with Anthony Davis that I thought were really interesting. And I wonder if... that brings to mind for you any other sort of like dangers of the internet and internet culture in politics today, or if you can expand on maybe some of that and how internet culture is playing a role in politics today.

Tara:
Oh gosh, yes. That is a packed stack question. First, thank you for the kind words about that podcast. I credit that mostly to Anthony. He's an excellent, excellent interviewer and friend. I love his work. And I, yeah, gosh, there's so much to say about this. I actually just read a sub stack that I follow called garbage day that I also encourage folks to check out. And I am the writer was talking about internet culture today and the increasing distance between sort of elite publications and elite kind of pundits and reporters and lists. I think the reference was to like the top 40 podcasters was like some article that came out and the top 40 that they listed were all like national, political or... celebrity kind of names. And it just, the writer was making the point about how out of touch that world increasingly out of touch that kind of like elite nepotism driven, relationship driven kind of industry, media industry side is from actually the mass public and internet culture as it exists sort of in its most raw and best creative and interesting forms. And I do think that a lot of especially folks in older generations, millennial and on up, frankly, are not living in these enclaves of the internet that are really where creativity and authenticity and communication are happening. And like,

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
I don't even pretend to be somebody who like lives in real internet culture whatsoever. But I know that it is more vast and more powerful than sort of these more sensitized forms of media today that, you know, older generations rely on and it really colors how we see the world. So I think that it's exciting. I think that I see it in a lot of the work that my Gen Z employees and the Gen Z communities that we engage online, like they are so much more creative and interesting and smart and compelling than I ever was at their

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
age. They have grown up with all of this technology and all of this empowered ability, which has a lot of downside as we know. in terms of mental illness. And there's so many things, right? I am not

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
saying that this is a purely good thing. There's none. We don't know all of the dangers of it either. And yet from a creative standpoint and a community building standpoint, there is some real richness to the way that new generations, younger generations are communicating with each other and are building relationships that don't have boundaries. and are really just kind of pushing the envelope and understanding that they have real power by building audience and engagement in this attention industry and in this attention economy. And I think that everything is going to be entirely different looking from how our governments are run to institutions, to business, to everything when that generation and the generations that have come up after it are in charge. I

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
think it- we're all waiting, right? As we see

Sean Lukasik:
Yes.

Tara:
these people like Mitch McConnell and Diane Pintstein, like holding on to their power, where then we have like folks coming up the ranks, younger folks in elected office, like AOC and Jeff Jackson in North Carolina,

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
who are just such good, strong, clear communicators who know how to use these tools. And they're not even nearly as creative or as natively engaged in how to leverage communication today as younger generations. So I think... I think it's exciting. I think like everything, we need to be worried about how bad actors take advantage of these things. But

Sean Lukasik:
Sure.

Tara:
frankly, internet culture, the more you get embedded in sort of the unorthodox or not blessed kind of corporatized communications that exist, like the more inspired I think and hopeful you can get about humanity and society and the generations coming up, but also like it's different, it's weird and it's cool. And I think that that's gonna become the norm over the next 10 years. as opposed

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
to sort of the, you know, the fringe.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah, it's, it's terrifying seeing like when Mark Zuckerberg was in front of Congress, some of the questions that he had to field, you know, people and you said it earlier, you know, I'm certainly not part of the younger demographic using the internet today. But my god, the cringy questions and things that were directed at Mark Zuckerberg and I really enjoy golf, I enjoy following the PGA tour and some of what's been happening politically with the Saudi

Tara:
Yeah.

Sean Lukasik:
tour and when Jay Monahan, who's the commissioner of the PGA tour was in front of Congress, it was the same thing. And it's like, they're extremely out of touch with modern, well, internet culture for sure. And then you see it play out in other topics that you might be more familiar with that it's terrifying. And it's terrifying to see people like that running the country when they're not even sure how to run their own Facebook account.

Tara:
Right. And I don't think the solution, because I've tried this, I don't think the solution is getting them to understand it and adopt

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
it. The solution is empowering the people who live within it and want to do good with it. And that has always been, that's certainly how I was able to build my weird but mission-driven career was because the Obama campaign and culture was really about empowering young people and not only listening to the older consultants who had been doing this work forever and ever, because guess what? If you've done it a long time, that's a detriment, not an advantage any longer.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah.

Tara:
It really is about the folks that live in the culture today and empowering them to show us how it's done.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah, you said something in an interview about a political campaign you were working on. And you said we invested a ton in memes. And that made me laugh just thinking about the effect that those have on people young and old for sure. I mean, I get memes sent to me from everyone in the entire range of people that I have relationships with in my life. And how did you arrive at that? Like, how did you end up spending a ton in memes? What does that look like? Do you have these creative people that you're talking about, you know, out there create, making these memes for the campaign.

Tara:
Yeah, that was the work that was part of the work we did at acronym and when we were running political and advocacy advertising campaigns was, you know, traditional ads even on digital like that's not what resonates with people it's stuff that's in the culture and means are, you know, means are today's political cartoons from the newspapers like that's all

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
it is it's a way of putting an issue or conversation into a human context into something that is entertaining or comedic or you know just surprising. It's all the best tools of communication that open doors for people to build bridges and to learn things. And we live in a meme culture still. I don't think that's going anywhere either. We've always had it. That's paste-ups and billboards. It's just that's what they are on the internet. And so I think you could probably describe some of the work that my reporters do in our newsrooms as memes because they're

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
just easier ways to digest complicated issues and topics. But yeah, we resourced a lot of different creatives and solicited ideas from different designers and artists and creatives for that work back at acronym. And I think it's really important. A lot of folks are influenced by memes more so than they're ever going to read an article or pick up a newspaper.

Sean Lukasik:
Yeah. Now, I kind of want to end with maybe a big question. You said that you got into journalism to affect real world change. And as someone who's, you know, observed your work and seeing some of the things that you've done, I would say you've done that already. And I'm curious about your perspective on what you set out to do. Like what's your self assessment here in at this point in your career in accomplishing that goal?

Tara:
Ooh, that's very kind of you, Sean, that's very kind. I feel like you took a page out of Anthony's book too because he got me with a bad question at the end of his too that hit a personal chord with me. I am so, so proud of the work that I and my teams have done over the years. I went through, I burnt out like a lot of folks do in politics, I burnt out pretty intensely after. the 2020 election and I didn't lose so much steam, but for me, it was a lot of steam and I did do a lot of reflection. And I remember one of the thoughts that just you brought back to mind that I had in that period where I didn't really, I just was depleted and I wasn't sure if I was going to get back in the arena and keep going or what that was going to look like. Because I also was reflecting on how I put my personal life totally aside for so many And the thought that came to mind was that I was so, so proud of the contribution that my team across acronym and career at the time had made in defeating Donald Trump and that I didn't need anyone else to really know or understand quite the difference that I knew that we had made in the work that we did and how, and how surgical we were about who we were reaching and how, and building that trust. And I remember thinking that if that was the last thing that I did professionally, that I felt really, really good about it and that would be okay. And that was a crazy thing to feel. Wasn't like, you know, okay, I can like, you know, hang up my jacket and call it a life and call it a day because I don't know what else I would do with this work, but it was really meaningful. And I think the other thing that I've started to do a lot more of and think a lot more of and just find a lot of joy in is... is mentoring other women that have worked with me or work with me or don't who have found me on social media or things of that nature. Because I only am where I am because of women mentors and

Sean Lukasik:
Mm-hmm.

Tara:
friends that told me that I could do it when a lot of forces and other folks under estimated me. And so I really think that it is about once you've accomplished what you can and you've. kind of paved the way or sort of broken through some barriers or walls, it's your responsibility to help others through those pathways. And I would love if that's just a bigger and bigger part of my contribution to this world moving forward.

Sean Lukasik:
Well, thank you for the work that you've done and thank you for spending a little bit of time today to talk about it and to share your thoughts on it. And good luck as you're breaking into New Hampshire and Texas and whatever else is on the horizon to come. Thanks so much, Tara.

Tara:
Thank you so much for all the work that you do, Sean. And it's been such a pleasure to talk to you and we will scheme together about bringing courier to New York at some point. So I look forward to it.