ANALYSIS
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Politico's Obsessive Focus Is Future of News
It's all politics, all the time, and it works
By Kevin Spak
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Posted Jul 1, 09 6:27 PM CDT
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(Newser)
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If you want to see the future of news—and how it will be delivered—look no further than Politico as a reasonable guide, writes Newser founder Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair. Unlike general-interest newspapers, which flail about knowing too little about everything, Politico has an obsessive focus: “It exalts, and fetishizes, in breathless, even orgiastic news flashes, the most boring subject in the world: the granular workings of government bureaucracy.”
Yet Politico has found an audience and, in fact, spun off a thriving print version. The detail the site collects is hungrily read by about 6.7 million political junkies a month. Politico's "over-informed motormouths" deliver the raw material, before mainstream news organizations get hold of it. "It is perhaps useless to argue whether this is good or bad. Rather, the world is as it is. And Politico seems like a pretty credible version of what the world will be: obsessives everywhere in their particular narrow-focused areas of interest, flashing ever more information, ever quicker, in ever shorter bites...to all the ships at sea."