Politico set out to cover Washington the way ESPN covers sport
In 2007 two Washington Post journalists left to start a website that would treat politics like a sports channel: fast, granular, obsessed with every play. Reporters carried video cameras on every assignment and were told to promote their work anywhere. Within a year the upstart was drawing over three million unique visits a month.
John F. Harris became editor-in-chief and Jim VandeHei executive editor, with money from the banker and media executive Robert Allbritton. The site went live on 23 January 2007, and the first hire was Mike Allen from Time. Originally The Politico, it dropped the article from its name in 2009. Between the 2008 and 2012 elections its staff more than tripled, and by 2016 it employed nearly 500 people worldwide.
Its most influential product may have been a morning email. Allen launched Playbook in June 2007, a dense early briefing on who was up, who was down and what mattered that day. By 2016 more than 100,000 people read it daily, from lobbyists and journalists to senators and presidents, and commentators credited it with setting the tone of the national news cycle. In 2017 a single week's sponsorship cost 50,000 to 60,000 dollars. Allen later left to co-found Axios, and his successors departed to launch Punchbowl News.
Over time the outlet shifted towards long-form reporting and investigations of officials in Washington, several of which preceded resignations. It also went abroad. A 2014 joint venture with the German publisher Axel Springer launched a Brussels edition, which a survey soon found to be the most widely read outlet among the city's policy insiders, though rated less influential than the Financial Times, BBC or The Economist.
In 2021 Axel Springer bought the whole company for over a billion dollars. Its chief executive told staff they were expected to share the group's core principles, among them backing free markets and European unity. More recently the newsroom's union took management to arbitration over AI products rolled out without the contractually required 60 days' notice.
Source: Politico
