Interesting article in this month's issue of Vanity Fair.
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.
By Michael Wolff August 2009
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 paperat least in the matter of a reader's special interest, but also by inference everything elsehad no idea what it was talking about.
Sixteen years later, the ultimate result of Crichton's theory about the fallacy of general-interest newsand, as a corollary, the answer to the riddle of who's going to report the news when traditional, general-interest news organizations stop doing itis, for better and worse, Politico.
Politico is the Web site (and accompanying newspaper) launched by two former Washington 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 daywhereas 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 deliveredhence, 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 timetraveling 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 mediumfor ever more information about actions or events or thoughts nearly simultaneous with their occurrencechange the message and, likely, politics too.
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More at: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/wolff200908
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