Video: Staying On Offense, Being Loud - A Conversation with Tara McGowan
On Friday, October 7th NDN hosted Tara McGowan, a leading thinker and practitioner in finding new, more effective ways to get the narratives and arguments of the center-left across in American politics. Tara is the founder and Publisher of Courier Newsroom, a left-leaning local news organization that has newsrooms in eight battleground states, and veteran political strategist. Tara provided an overview of the Courier project, and reflected a bit on the broader challenges we have in breaking through in a very noisy and often dystopian modern information environment. This was without doubt one of the more enjoyable and interesting conversations we've had this year.
Watch it here, follow Tara at @taraemcg, and and feel free to share our discussion with others. Note that some of the technical issues apparent towards the beginning resolve themselves midway thru.
For more on Simon's thinking about loudness be sure to read this essay.
More on Tara McGowan
Tara McGowan is the founder and Publisher of Courier Newsroom, a left-leaning local news organization that has newsrooms in eight battleground states.
A former political campaign strategist, Tara has seen firsthand how America’s information crisis has contributed to the rise of authoritarianism and the deterioration of social trust. In 2017, Tara founded a nonprofit, ACRONYM, to build the first organization focused entirely on increasing experimentation, innovation and impact in digital communications and organizing tactics. As part of that work, Tara oversaw the largest digital advertising program that helped remove Donald Trump from office in the 2020 election. Recognizing that successful investment in safeguarding our democracy and building progressive power in America requires diversifying the left’s traditional approach to communications and increasing year-round reach and engagement of the millions of American who vote infrequently, Tara founded Courier Newsroom in 2019, and departed ACRONYM in 2021 to focus her time fully on building a more honest, values-driven, and strategic media ecosystem for the left. Today, Courier’s network of newsrooms have built trust with over 800,000 less politically engaged online subscribers, reach over 60M Americans online each year, and have measurably increased low propensity voter turnout in over 20 state and federal elections.
Earlier in her career, Tara led multi-million dollar digital advertising and marketing programs for nonprofits and political groups, including Priorities USA, NextGen Climate, Planned Parenthood, and President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. She attended journalism school at NYU and was briefly a reporter and Associate Producer at 60 Minutes and PBS Frontline before making democracy work her full-time focus and passion.
