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Key links:
Primary website:
politico.com
Primary Twitter:
@politico

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

Politico is a Washington-based website and newspaper that focuses on American politics.

Politico was founded in 2007 and is owned by Allbritton Communications, a media company that also owns eight television stations, the New York local news site Capital New York, and, briefly, the defunct Washington-based local news website TBD. As of mid-2013, it had a staff of about 230, including the largest White House contingent of any news organization.

Politico publishes a free 33,000-circulation newspaper Monday to Friday when Congress is in session and on Wednesdays when not — but far more of its readership comes through its website, which drew more than four million unique visitors per month as of 2011 and ranks as one of the United States’ most popular newspaper websites. As of 2011, about half of its revenue came from its newspaper. It also runs Politico Pro, a thousands-of-dollars-per-year subscription service for information on energy, technology and health care. It announced plans to expand the service in 2012, and in 2013 planned to add three new verticals to the service.

As an organization specifically geared toward Washington insiders, Politico covers both policy issues and political minutiae and gossip, looking at issues through the lens of political power. Playbook, the daily morning email newsletter penned by Politico’s chief White House correspondent, Mike Allen, exemplifies that ethos. Overall, Politico aims to use the speed of the web to drive the political news cycle both online and in traditional media, a philosophy summed up by the newsroom’s motto, “Win the morning, win the afternoon.”

Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
May 7, 2024 / Joshua Benton
This year’s Pulitzer Prizes were a coming-out party for online media — and a marker of local newspapers’ decline — Some day in the distant future, scholars looking back on the evolution (devolution?) of the American news business will consider May 6, 2024 a date worthy of note. They’ll see it as the day the most prestigious pri...
May 3, 2023 / Hanaa' Tameez
A new fellowship, backed by Robert Allbritton, aims to shake up the Capitol Hill reporting pipeline — In Washington, D.C., a new $20 million effort aims to produce more political journalism while making the profession more accessible. Founded and funded by Politico founder Robert Allbritton, the Allbritton Journalism Ins...
April 4, 2023 / Laura Hazard Owen
A former Protocol editor buys part of the company’s email list to launch something new — A news organization shuts down, and its writers move to Substack while they’re trying to decide what to do next: We’ve seen that before. This time the story has a twist: A former editor of Politico’s no...
Aug. 26, 2021 / Joshua Benton
Politico is being sold for more than $1 billion; here are some of the smart moves it made to get there — Politico, the inside-the-Beltway news site so many love to hate, is now a billion-dollar company. This morning, after weeks of rumors, the German media conglomerate Axel Springer SE announced it was buying the whole oper...
April 6, 2021 / Joshua Benton
Why does so much news about the European Union still come out of London, even post-Brexit? — We’ve written often about the sense of dislocation brought about by the switch from local, analog news sources to national, digital ones. News used to come from people who lived in your town and shopped at your gro...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: March 27, 2014.
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