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 day—whereas 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 delivered—hence, 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.
Music to my Web 2.0 copyfighter ears:
News organizations, in the Harris-VandeHei-Allen formulation, are deadweight. Institutional authority, which once defined journalists—“The most important words were what came after your name: ‘I’m John Harris of The Washington Post’”—has increasingly become an indication of mediocrity. “In 2006 we didn’t yet know that newspapers were dead,” Harris continued, in my conversation with him one afternoon in Politico’s Virginia offices. “I think we thought they’d drag on, but the institutional age of newspapers was clearly over. What mattered was the individual talents and reputations of journalists. The best journalists had broken free. The best have their own names. They were carrying the business.”
Interesting, too, that Politico now has a larger presence in the West Wing than any other news organization.