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March 28, 2024

The Politico Breaks Some New Ground

Important Details: Coming to a Congressional capital near you: it’s the Politico. The Politico, coming to ThePolitico.com on Jan. 23, the day of the President’s State-of-the-Union speech, is intended to fully embrace the Web as a way of getting out political news and analysis. It’s built on the foundation of The Capitol Leader print pub, distributed to the D.C. political community. The new product will combine print — a publishing schedule targets midweek publication — and online. The online part intends to embrace video, audio and databases, all with the intention of using each medium for what it does best.

The new venture is funded by Allbritton Communications, an owner of broadcast and cable properties.

Joining The Politico’s team is a fairly high-powered group of inside-the-Beltway journalists, including well-respected names from the Washington Post, Time Magazine and Bloomberg. They’ll head a staff that will include "15 or 20" younger journalists, in their 20s and 30s, who will bring on-the-hill reporting to the effort. Mike Allen, a Time reporter who becomes the chief political correspondent for the publication says the novelty of the launch is that "a political newspaper and a Web site will have the same DNA."

In Outsell’s Opinion: There is a lot of competition in Washington to get targeted political news to those who need it. The Politico will be taking on Roll Call and The Hill, as well as competing for time with the political coverage of the hometown Washington Post (which had two reporters defect to The Politico). How well it executes its business plan, finding a mix of reader and advertiser revenue, will of course be key. For those watching the unraveling and re-creation of newer media, this will be an experiment worth watching. Within its intention, we see several common threads very much in play among all news publishers:

  • How do you mix high-priced, higher-profile journalists with younger, lower-priced, presumably more energetic ones? Just as newspaper owners have pushed for two-tier pay systems, this alchemy of new/old, experienced/energetic is one that will play out in many places.
  • How do you leverage the pass-around value of political/newsy information and comment in print, and the "instantaneity" of it online? How do you combine the smarts of well-experienced text reporting with timely, to-the-point audio and video? Dow Jones has been most public with its announced organizational shifts to accomplish both, while numerous other newsrooms, large and small, are trying to get a formula right. It’s tough work. It requires demanding, nuanced leadership, a talent for the art of change management and the "stick-to-ittiveness" to operate different daily.
  • Data is a key here. CNN.com won a good audience on the last election night and the days soon after, realizing its readers wanted to dig through the data themselves, and providing them the tools and deep data to do just that. Data is key to so much of what happens in Washington, and The Politico’s ability to open the treasure trove of data — and guide readers to it — could give it a competitive advantage.
  • This is a niche play, targeting 25,000 readers in print, and all those online who are professional political junkies. The creators say they’ll outrun the Post and Times by letting go of all those "general news" assignments and concentrating on just the stuff their narrow readership cares about. Niche plays concentrate the mind — and the marketing.

Roger Simon, who is coming over to The Politico from Bloomberg, said, "We won’t reinvent the wheel. We’ll just do it better." Outsell believes that’s exactly it. It’s just a way of discovering the perfect publishing solution, but instead, agilely finding it through a process of constant iteration.