If you are an Inside member, you’re familiar with the Inside Briefings we’ve done over the years. We’re launching a new kind of briefing: Inside TPM. This will be a series of monthly interviews with TPM staffers (and down the road, potentially alumni and friends-of-site) to help readers and viewers and listeners better understand TPM and the people who work here.

In the first episode, I spoke with Josh Kovensky about covering the Trump hush money trial, what he learned from his time in Ukraine, and much more. I hope you enjoy and we’ll be back next month with another video.

This weekend we’re going to be doing some very important site maintenance to upgrade our membership system. The site will remain online and our staff will continue to publish, so if there’s any breaking news, you can still count on TPM. However, while this work is going on, you will be unable to log into your account, comment, or access The Hive. Archived member-only content will also be inaccessible.

The work will begin early Saturday morning and may extend into Sunday. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but this work is critical to the stability and security of the site. Suffice to say it’s extremely important and we thank you for your patience during this process.

Yesterday we kicked off TPM’s annual membership drive. Obviously, we hope you will become a member. We also assume you get lots of pitches from all sorts of companies that sell all sorts of products and services. Hell, they are even selling byzantine subscriptions for printers these days. Because every company under the sun is asking you to pay a recurring fee, it seems the sales pitches are becoming downright strange. Cringe, in the lingua franca of today’s youth.

So let’s get back to basics, shall we? (Unless you are ready to sign up now, in which case you can skip the post and click here.)

We recently asked if you’d help us out by answering some survey questions. First of all, thank you to everyone who did. These are massively helpful in terms of helping us decide how to improve TPM and better serve all of you.

There’s one particular piece of feedback I saw going through the thousands of results that I thought I’d address here. Several people asked if we’d bring back free or reduced-rate memberships for senior citizens and/or students. So here’s the good news: We still have free memberships for seniors and students. In fact, anyone who can’t afford a membership can apply for a community-sponsored membership here.

If you haven’t take on our reader survey yet, there’s still time! Feedback from readers helps us chart the future of TPM, and informs how we can best serve, you, the readers. We’d greatly appreciate it if you could spare five minutes to help us out. Thanks!

Do you have five minutes to answer a few questions? We aren’t offering any gift card drawings, but on your deathbed you will receive total consciousness – which is nice – and you will help us learn more about how we can improve and adapt TPM to this increasingly volatile news environment. All answers are confidential and used only for internal research. Thank you!

Yesterday I wrote that a subset of users were experiencing a couple issues. We now believe this issue has been resolved. The source of the problem was some server maintenance work gone awry by one of our hosting partners. But our crack team of developers figured out what was going on, notified the partner, and they were able to fix the issues last night.

Thanks to all the readers who wrote in, was a big help. Teamwork makes the dreamwork.

Also, if you aren’t a member, how about changing that today?

We are aware of an issue currently affecting some users that prevents them from accessing site features and also displays the wrong number of ads. Specifically, we believe it’s affecting users from the greater Chicago area.

If you are experiencing this issue, you could help us resolve it by letting us know if any of the following are true for you:

• You are NOT from the greater Chicago area.
• Logging into TPM while on another network resolves the issue. For example, if you have trouble using the site on your mobile device while on a wifi network, but not  when wifi is off and you are using cellular data.

You can contact us at siteissues at talkingpointsmemo dot com.

Getting this fixed is the top priority and we apologize for the inconvenience.