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Comment by biohacker42 | Hacker News Reader

I think politico is the true herald of the digital journalism future. They are hard journalists, they are small and efficient like a startup, and they are profitable. They are also very narrowly focused.

The problem with the majority of currently falling news organizations is the fat profit margins they've been enjoying. And there's no helping them.

Let me put it this way, after the railroads no amount of cleverness and inventiveness was going to save the pony express.

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One big problem/wrinkle with the "Politico is the future" thesis is that Politico makes all it's money by selling classified ads in a weekly print newspaper it distributes across Washington D.C. according to Vanity Fair:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/wolff200...

From what I recall of the piece: The guy funding Politico originally wanted to publish a weekly Capitol Hill insider paper. The well-known editors and journalists who left the WaPo to start Politico convinced him that going hard on the web, breaking news every hour etc was the way of the future.

Yet, the original, "boring" idea, to offer a weekly Capitol Hill paper, is where they make all their money. The web site is in some ways just a marketing tool for their print product.

So when people tell me "doing a Politico" is how to make news on the web, I'm skeptical. That approach is a great way to build a brand, but you still need a way to convert that brand into $$$. That's where we need innovation.

Everything you say is fact, and yet I completely disagree with your interpretation of the facts.

The original "boring" idea would be bankrupt by now if it wasn't for the website. So yes, they are using the web as advertising, that doesn't mean it's not the key to their existence.

And they are making money by selling a physical product, there's a lesson there too. How many free websites are funded by selling shwag? Isn't Joel's free blog selling fogbugz? There's a pattern here.

"The original idea would be bankrupt if it wasn't for the website."

Citation needed.

The point of my comment was to point out that all the stuff about being "fast, lean, quick, lo-fi, bloggy" or whatever news buzzwords you hear bandied about as being the solution are not in fact the solution in and of themselves since they have nothing to do with actually making money.

At the end of the day, Politico's a lot like College Humor. It has a content web site it uses to promote a physical product where it actually makes money (T-shirts in CH's case). I don't know that there's much to learn from that example.

I haven't bothered checking Politico since the 2008 U.S. election. They were horrifyingly fixated on covering the horse race, with a big spot on the front page dedicated to who "won" the day. Iirc, they also build the partisan split directly into their information architecture and staff, another big no-no as far as I'm concerned. This sort of thing is what's ruining our politics.

In theory, I would be interested in a site with a tight focus on low-level politics, but Politico ain't it.

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