From left, Politico executive editor Jim VandeHei, editor in chief John Harris, publisher Robert Allbritton, and chief White House correspondent Mike Allen at Politico’s offices. Photograph by Gasper Tringale. In the fourth issue of Wired magazine, in the fall of 1993, just as the Internet was entering public consciousness, Michael Crichton, the author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, wrote an essay arguing that newspapers were doomed because they were too dumb. As information became cheaper, more plentiful, and easier to get, consumers, he argued, would become ever more immersed in their specific interests and understand that their more generally oriented paper—at least in the matter of a reader’s special interest, but also by inference everything else—had no idea what it was talking about. Sixteen years later, the ultimate result of Crichton’s theory about the fallacy of general-interest news—and, as a corollary, the answer to the riddle of who’s going to report the news when traditional, general-interest news organizations stop doing it—is, for better and worse, Politico. Politico is the Web site (and accompanying newspaper) launched by two formerWashington Post reporters to cover the 2008 presidential campaign, and which, with 100 or so staffers, is defying all reason and expectations by continuing to prosper beyond the election season. Not only is it, in its way, a direct manifestation of Crichton’s observation about flaccid and dumbed-down news, but it is also something rather close to one of those sinister and unstoppable forces in a Crichton novel: more information than you want to know, as well as more than you probably should know and can know, altering the very metabolic rate of the people who supply it and of those who become habituated to trying to know it. CNN changed the nature of politics and political reporting by compressing the time it took for something to happen, for it to become widely known, and for newsmakers and the public to react to it (i.e., the news cycle) to half a day—whereas the newspaper news cycle, from next-day publication to day-after reaction, was 48 hours, and network television’s news cycle, from one day’s evening news to the next day’s evening news, was 24 hours. Politico brings the news cycle down to about 15 or 20 minutes. Politico further alters the nature and effect of news by undermining the favorite view of old-line news organizations that news can be “platform agnostic”—a preferred phrase of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. This implies that content is content and it doesn’t matter how it’s delivered—hence, existing news organizations, with their existing content, can yet find a way to sell it. But Politico’s news is not like political news has ever been. Its Internet-focused version is some obsessive-compulsive mix of trade journal, Twitter feed, and, quite literally, real-time chat with seniormost newsmakers and leakers. It is constant, unrelenting, second by second. It exalts, and fetishizes, in breathless, even orgiastic news flashes, the most boring subject in the world: the granular workings of government bureaucracy. It is, arguably, in its hyperbolic attentions and exertions, in its fixations on interests that could not possibly interest anyone but the person doing it and the writer writing about it, something like a constant parody of itself. “Sasha Obama is 8 today (really, this time—traveling press got a little ahead of itself last weekend). Plus Gov. Jindal, Joe Trippi and Jeff Greenfield. And get this: John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer,” reads the lead of a recent dispatch. In the Marshall McLuhan prescription, the demands of the medium—for ever more information about actions or events or thoughts nearly simultaneous with their occurrence—change the message and, likely, politics too. For two generations—since Watergate, let us say—politics has been about opposing Washington. The true modern American ideology was to believe that the federal government, if not evil, was grossly ineffective and pathetically out of touch. Practicing politics, or writing about it, was a job not for the best and brightest but for the narrow-minded and obtuse. Even Washington reporters, once the zenith of the trade, became stodgy relics. Washington was not even the center of power—finance, media, and technology had much more immediate effects on people’s lives than government did. A whole language grew up to characterize the oddness, and the emotional limitations, of the Beltway-centric: “wonks” or, their own, self-loathing favorite, “political junkies” or, that most merciless characterization of Washington, “Hollywood for the ugly.” Even cable television, with its left and right divide, was not interested in politics per se, or in Washington, but in the clash of opposing sides. Nobody, except the wonks, was interested, except to deride it, in the civics-class culture of insider relationships, horse-trading, and compromise that most obsesses political professionals. But, all of a sudden, the politician as player, politics as the art of the astute, Washington as the true Hollywood of billion-dollar deals and iconic careers, are back. This is because of Barack Obama (not just a star, but the first senator—i.e., Washington insider—to be elected president since J.F.K.), and because the economic crisis has centered so much wealth in Washington—and because of Politico. Or, put another way, much of the country may still find politics to be an execrable and mind-numbing proposition, but Politico has built a far-flung network of actual and armchair political professionals who find it not just exhilarating but habit-forming. They’re on the edge of their seats. Politics may not be the national sport again, but it’s a niche sport with the right audience. While it’s almost unheard of for a revolution to come from the people most engaged with the system they’re overthrowing, Politico is an insider’s coup. Its founders, John Harris and Jim VandeHei, along with Mike Allen, who joined them early on, all between 35 and 45, are standard-bearers of the Washington press corps rather than its malcontents. They’re small-town boys—Harris from Rochester, VandeHei from Oshkosh, Allen from Orange County—who came, wide-eyed, to Washington and rose to top political jobs at the top news organizations. VandeHei and Allen have, between them, cycled through The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. Harris, whose 2005 book, The Survivor, is regarded by the in-the-knows as hands down the best book on the Clinton presidency, was at The Washington Post since he was an intern, in 1985, rising to become the national-politics editor, a position from which he supervised thePost’s White House and campaign coverage. Their radical idea was not to flatten or break open this most insular of towns but in effect to make it more parochial and self-obsessed. As insider journalists, they feared that newspapers, more and more the province of the defeated and apathetic, would bring journalism’s stars and elites down with them. “Newspaper people are living 1950s-style organization-man lives years after that career model became obsolete,” says Harris, a suburban-dad-looking type, who is clearly fighting his own organization-man destiny.BELTWAY BOYS
Politico’s Washington Coup
Four old-media veterans may have solved the future of news with the Politico Web site, whose audience of six million obsessives and insiders consumes–and feeds–a real-time download of power data. The twist? Politico’s print version is what’s helped make it profitable.
Thursday, 27 August 2009
August 2009
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