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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, Newser Staff

Posted Jul 1, 2009 6:27 PM CDT

(Newser) – 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."

[Images (3)]

[Quotes (4)]

A screenshot from Ben Smith's blog on Politico.

A screenshot from Mike Allen's "Playbook" blog.

Co-founder of Politico John Harris. (Getty Images)

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Politico’s news is not like political news has ever been. It's some obsessive-compulsive mix of trade journal, Twitter feed, and real-time chat with newsmakers and leakers. - Michael Wolff

If Google wanted to own Washington coverage, well, all it would have to do is take the six or seven journalists who are really producing stuff and put them in one place. Well, why couldn’t we do that? - John Harris, Politico founder

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, something like a constant parody of itself. - Michael Wolff

Politics may not be the national sport again, but it’s a niche sport with the right audience. - Michael Wolff

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Politico's Obsessive Focus Is Future of News