Jul
31
“hile it’s almost unheard of for a revolution to come from the people most engaged with the system they’re overthrowing, Politico is an insider’s coup.
Its founders, John Harris and Jim VandeHei, along with Mike Allen, who joined them early on, all between 35 and 45, are standard-bearers of the Washington press corps rather than its malcontents. They’re small-town boys—Harris from Rochester, VandeHei from Oshkosh, Allen from Orange County—who came, wide-eyed, to Washington and rose to top political jobs at the top news organizations. VandeHei and Allen have, between them, cycled through The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. Harris, whose 2005 book, The Survivor, is regarded by the in-the-knows as hands down the best book on the Clinton presidency, was at The Washington Post since he was an intern, in 1985, rising to become the national-politics editor, a position from which he supervised the Post’s White House and campaign coverage.
Their radical idea was not to flatten or break open this most insular of towns but in effect to make it more parochial and self-obsessed.
As insider journalists, they feared that newspapers, more and more the province of the defeated and apathetic, would bring journalism’s stars and elites down with them.
“Newspaper people are living 1950s-style organization-man lives years after that career model became obsolete,” says Harris, a suburban-dad-looking type, who is clearly fighting his own organization-man destiny.
The problem is not, for any of the three founders, merely that the newspaper business is broke, but that newspapers themselves, which so many people are arguing now need to be preserved, are busted: “The Post’s reputation was superior to its actual day-in-and-day-out achievement,” says Harris. “I don’t say that with any kind of malice. It’s not to disparage the Post, but it’s definitely true that a lot of the material was done with a shrug of the shoulders.” Michael Wolff on Politico | vanityfair.com
Its founders, John Harris and Jim VandeHei, along with Mike Allen, who joined them early on, all between 35 and 45, are standard-bearers of the Washington press corps rather than its malcontents. They’re small-town boys—Harris from Rochester, VandeHei from Oshkosh, Allen from Orange County—who came, wide-eyed, to Washington and rose to top political jobs at the top news organizations. VandeHei and Allen have, between them, cycled through The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. Harris, whose 2005 book, The Survivor, is regarded by the in-the-knows as hands down the best book on the Clinton presidency, was at The Washington Post since he was an intern, in 1985, rising to become the national-politics editor, a position from which he supervised the Post’s White House and campaign coverage.
Their radical idea was not to flatten or break open this most insular of towns but in effect to make it more parochial and self-obsessed.
As insider journalists, they feared that newspapers, more and more the province of the defeated and apathetic, would bring journalism’s stars and elites down with them.
“Newspaper people are living 1950s-style organization-man lives years after that career model became obsolete,” says Harris, a suburban-dad-looking type, who is clearly fighting his own organization-man destiny.
The problem is not, for any of the three founders, merely that the newspaper business is broke, but that newspapers themselves, which so many people are arguing now need to be preserved, are busted: “The Post’s reputation was superior to its actual day-in-and-day-out achievement,” says Harris. “I don’t say that with any kind of malice. It’s not to disparage the Post, but it’s definitely true that a lot of the material was done with a shrug of the shoulders.” Michael Wolff on Politico | vanityfair.com
