The Politico is produced just a couple floors below the office whence I type these words, and its staff has counted more than a few of my fellow former Hotline colleagues. Heck, I’ve got two of their promotional coffee mugs in my kitchen cupboard at home. So I take great interest in this American Journalism Review article on its first two years in existence. Here’s how it begins:
When veteran Washington Post political reporters John Harris and Jim VandeHei urged their bosses to create a Web site strictly dedicated to politics, management didn’t jump at the idea.
Less than two years later, Politico, the venture they envisioned – and left the Post to take on – is a success, and a politics-only site is “under study” at the Post, according to Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr.
“The proof is in the figures,” says Harris, Politico’s editor in chief. In May, it had 3.5 million unique visitors and 25.1 million page views, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. Editor & Publisher ranked Politico the 10th-most-visited newspaper site that month.
Although Harris would not reveal revenue or advertising numbers, he says Politico’s operations are already self-sustaining and the Allbritton Communications-owned publication should be profitable next year. Print advertising provides about 60 percent of its revenue, VandeHei says.
Under normal circumstances, nobody expects print ventures to be profitable in a short period of time. The last few years have been anything but normal, with newspapers in particular hemorrhaging readers and surgically removing staff writers.
Yet the Politico seems more relevant than ever. Though it is not without its flaws, perhaps this is what makes it so timely. And if it really is just a year from profitability, that’s a good sign for the news industry, right?
Not so fast, says Ezra Klein, in a post at The American Prospect:
Here you have this forward-thinking, primarily virtual venture to create a political news organization that marries old-school reporting values to the speed and the immediacy of the web and it actually works. A year-and-a-half after launch, it’s getting 3.5 million unique visitors per month and 25 million page views. And yet not only is it unprofitable, but 60 percent of its revenues come from advertising in the 27,000 circulation print version. In other words: Politico got the online readership it dreamed of, but it hasn’t come even close to figuring out how to monetize it.
This makes sense. After all, massively popular websites like Facebook, Digg and MySpace can’t figure out how to make money off their audiences — why should a news site? Especially why a news site that’s entirely about politics? Everyone knows that politics isn’t where the money is. Consider, for example, how James Joyner subsidizes his high-minded Outside the Beltway blog with the lower-brow Gone Hollywood.
But not so fast again, says Kevin Drum, at The Washington Monthly:
But there’s another way of looking at it: without a website, The Politico would be dead in the water. If, instead of being almost profitable, it were still hemorrhaging a few million bucks a year with break-even years away, there’s a pretty good chance Allbritton would just shut it down. …
Bottom line: Print gets you respect and big dollar advertisers. The web gets you buzz and a nice chunk of additional revenue. The future — part of it, anyway — belongs to those who can successfully combine multiple media platforms into a single profitable whole. So far, it looks like The Politico has done that.
The premise is more complicated, but fair: the whole point of The Politico was to create an online-offline (and even televised) news hybrid. The Albrittons wouldn’t have bankrolled it in the first place without a website. And I do like the takeaway: the print and web editions can be mutually reinforcing.
This works in a glorified company town like Washington, where lobbying firms and trade associations are always there to buy an ad in the hope of influencing lawmakers and their staff. If this model is replicable in Chicago or Cincinnati or Corvallis, I’m not sure how.
Plus, it’s more than a little discouraging for anyone thinking about trying to create an online-only news organization. Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo do more newsgathering than any twenty of the top political blogs on the right, but they’re still a far cry from being a true professional news organization like The Politico.
All that said, we need more Politicos. I wonder what David Simon would have to say about it.
