INSIDE
THE CULT
News anchor Tom Brokaw appeared on the video, too, praising
chief White House correspondent
Mike Allen.
“I don’t know how he does
it,” Brokaw gushed about Allen,
“but whatever it is, we all want
a part of it.”
A few weeks later, during the
wedding reception of Jonathan
Martin, Politico’s senior political reporter, and Meet the Press
executive producer Betsy Fischer
— a chattering class soiree Allen chronicled on his must-read
morning “Playbook” — Brokaw
toasted the happy couple, noting that their marriage symbolized the “union of these two most
powerful organizations in American political journalism.”
So it is that Politico, the last
election cycle’s insurgent, has
morphed into a muscular member of this cycle’s establishment.
No longer the upstart it was
during Barack Obama’s 2008
presidential campaign, Politico’s
current success is also freighted
with the reality that however
cultish it may be, however pivotal it has become, it is also at a
crossroads: Having built a sizable
and still-expanding newsroom of
225 editorial and business staffers, Politico has to size up new
revenue streams and reshape
the franchise in such a way that
HUFFINGTON
06.24.12
staffers speculate the company’s
co-founders may not stick around
a few years from now.
In the middle of an election
year, with political junkies frothing, Politico’s traffic during the
first five months of 2012 is down,
from an average of 4.229 million
unique visitors in 2011 to 4.165
million so far this year, according to the Internet marketing
research firm comScore. Traffic
numbers over the past two years,
which have basically plateaued,
suggest Politico has captured just
about as big an audience as it can
for its unique brand of non-stop
political news.
Politico charges premium advertising rates in the Beltway,
but isn’t immune from the cur-