It's summer. Chill out. These people have families and friends and probably enjoy a good cookout or a day at the beach. If you're unable to live without 24-hour news coverage, why don't you write about the news instead of complaining that somebody else doesn't? Just sayin'.

No doubt there are many valid critiques of TPM. But in this case, you at least have the order of events off. And I think you're off base in general. As was fairly widely reported over the last couple weeks, TPM just raised its first money from outside investors. And part of what that money is going for is hiring a night and weekend editor for the site -- precisely because I don't think TPM can be the kind of news and reporting site it should be if it goes dark at 7 pm on weekdays and is only lightly updated over the weekends. So to the extent that having outside investors means the site is going 'corporate', which I don't think it does, that's what going to allow us to keep the site running 7 days a week and at least about 18 hours, if not 24 hours, a day.

Now, to your other point about the staff. TPM currently has 11 full-time staffers, not including myself and my wife, who are staff but also owners. The way my mind works, obsessive as I am, I probably would like them to be living and thinking the news and blogging it until they go to bed at night. And when news is breaking we frequently do work nights and weekends. But to assume that's the norm, is not only unrealistic but unfair. I don't know what your line of work is, but do you routinely stay on the job until you go to bed?

Now, it's true that I used to blog a lot more on the weekends than I do now, say back in 2000 to maybe 2005. So why don't I now? Basically two reasons. If you go back to the early history of the blog, there were days where I posted constantly and other times when I was busy with something else and did very little. It was very seldom that a whole day went by without a post. But it did sometimes happen.

Things are very different now. It's not just me and my laptop. It's a staff, payrolls to meet, posts to edit, budgets to keep on track, all the stuff that goes into making an organization like this run. Don't get me wrong. I'm totally blessed. I'm doing exactly what I want to do and I can support my family doing it. But at the end of the week, I'm pretty tired. So while I do usually post some on the weekend, I don't like I used to.

And the other reason, frankly is that in the early years of the blog I was single. And now I have a wife and two small children. Blogging through the weekend, every weekend, I assure you, would not fly.

So, to sum up, some of the same things that make us now able to deploy multiple reporters onto key stories also makes it difficult and simply not realistic to have the same people at it 24/7. And I think if you give some thought to it, that should not be hard to understand. Even as we are, the TPM staff works longer hours than most people do and goes with a pretty much non-stop intensity through about 10 hours monday through friday. However, as I noted, with the expansion we've now kicked off, we will soon have staffers working in the evenings and on the weekends. So the number of hours we're up and running each week will be greatly expanded.

One more point to the weekend thing. As far as I can tell, most political news doesn't break over the weekends, unless it's a Sarah Palin confuse-everyone-over-the-holiday type of event. Even the Gov. of South Carolina managed to disappear and reappear on weekdays.

Other than that, I agree with what everyone else said in the comments. Find your inner resources, dude!

Thank you Josh for the response. I think some of the responses I received were a little off the mark and here's why:

many of us work spread shifts so that there is coverage full time; in your case weekends. Just hearing that you are driving towards weekend editing is a plus.

I fully support a reduced workweek as a long time Union organizer. Again see the split shifts.

If your weekends are not long enough, take the wife and the babies during the middle of the week for some quality time. Have you considered a room for kids at work? (I know, blame NY rents).

We all went full steam last year. Now many of us with DC experience see the same old faces wearing down the promise of change. It's almost been a year since the election; snap out of it. Obama is fighting his own party. Where is the TPM push to get readers to bombard the evil six with some specific single insightful question from the brains at TPM?

DC is mired in muck. TPM seems to have lost that laser focus to highlight and push the really critical stories to their conclusion. DOJ should be getting asked everyday about prosecutions. I just testified for them last week in a Federal Court contempt hearing against the State of Tennessee for violating the human rights settlement for MR residents.

Josh, you are TPM. Hand off some of that accounting and other business chores to hired staff or outside guns. Yes, it costs more but it allows you to stay focused on who and what you are; the driving force behind the site. I know how tough that is in small tight organization, I own one.

Face it Josh...you are TPM as much as Murrow and Cronkite were CBS. Without their presence at those news desks what would we have done and become over the years. They didn't sit in the backroom; they made sure their thoughts and insights went out everyday (in their medium).

Getting a direct response from you brings me hope that all is not lost into the quagmire of daily business chores.

Thanks