Tara McGowan – Ms. Info

A former Democratic millions into Meta's ad operative is sinking networks to build a digital media machine for the left. Her strategy: Target potential voters with grabby local news stories, then get them to the polls.

- By Nancy Scola

It was a sunny june afternoon in Washington, DC, and even though Tara McGowan professes to hate this city, she was having fun.

A political operative turned publisher, she sat in a conference room in a WeWork office downtown, her fingertips loudly drumming away on the bright orange table. The energetic 36-year-old is the CEO of a company called Good Information, where she oversees a mini-empire of progressive local news sites across the United States.

Beaming in on a big video screen was Pat Rynard, himself a Democratic operative turned journalist and founder of a small political website called Iowa Starting Line, which The New York Times once declared the It’ read for political insiders.” McGowan had bought the site from him in 2021, making it the eighth in her growing collection of two to six-person newsrooms stretching from Arizona to North Carolina.

McGowan believes these outlets are the antidote to bad information—the hyperbole and lies that proliferate in Americans’ social media feeds and promote ideas mostly from the ideological right. Through the calculated injection of news stories into these feeds, McGowan thinks she can claw a crumbling republic back from the brink and—this is the important part—get more people to vote. She’s confident these new recruits to the democratic process will lean decidedly left.

Rynard walked her through an experiment in using Facebook's powerful ad-targeting tools. Iowa's primary elections were taking place the next day, and he wanted to know whether a handful of Iowa Starting Line's stories could shape the results. Primaries are the sort of political contest that both keep democracy afloat and tend to be roundly ignored.

"Remind me when the actual boosting of the coverage started?" asked McGowan, sipping from a giant pink water bottle.