O
INSIDE
THE CULT
HUFFINGTON
06.24.12
ON AN EARLY May evening, Politico executive editor and
co-founder Jim VandeHei rallied his troops on the 30th
floor of Allbritton Communications, located on the Virginia side of the Potomac and blessed with a clear view of
the Washington Monument rising above the nation’s capital. ¶ VandeHei praised his staffers’ dedication and hard
work in a pressure-cooker newsroom where “winning the
morning” is a mantra and burnout is part of the diet.
VandeHei, who’s fond of saying that his most successful
worker bees have a certain “screw loose,” also embraced
the idea that everybody at his politics-obsessed enterprise
should just keep swallowing their Kool Aid.
“We get flak for being a cult sometimes,” VandeHei said, according
to staffers present. “But you wanna know what? We are a cult!”
Roughly 150 staffers gathered that night for Politico’s fifth
birthday party, a belated celebration for a website and newspaper
that has become a pivotal force
in political reporting. As higherups catalogued the site’s achievements since its 2007 launch,
Robert Allbritton, Politico’s
publisher and CEO of the parent
company that bears his family’s
name, joined VandeHei and editor-in-chief John Harris, as the
room was treated to a video tribute to, well, Politico.
In the video, Presidents Barack
Obama and George W. Bush playfully mock Politico, a flurry of
cable news anchors reference the
site, and several political media
heavyweights offered birthday
wishes, including NBC’s David
Gregory, ABC’s Diane Sawyer,
CBS’s Bob Schieffer, MSNBC’s
Chris Matthews, and Time’s Mark
Halperin. Former NBC Nightly