INSIDE
THE CULT
the rumpled, sleeves-rolled-up
newspaper editor, albeit one not
averse to new technology. Though
an odd couple to look at, the cofounders often sign staff memos
“VandeHarris” and typically read
from the same script when it
comes to Politico.
Seated on a couch in VandeHei’s office, and frequently tapping away on a BlackBerry, Harris
acknowledges that Politico can’t
win on speed alone as it did in
2008, when “we were competing
against a number of organizations that hadn’t reckoned with
the immediacy, non-stop nature
of the news cycle.”
“Now that’s kind of taken as a
given, and you can put yourself
out of contention and make yourself irrelevant by not being fast.
But I don’t think you can make
yourself really distinctive by being fast. We’re looking for places
where we can have comparative
advantage,” Harris says.
He adds, “I think still the best
way to do it is by being bestinformed and smartest, most sophisticated. I think our core politics team is run by people who
are recognized, uniformly, really
in both parties, as being masters
of their beat. The phrase we use,
and you’ve heard it, is to be conversation drivers.”
I have often heard that phrase,
HUFFINGTON
06.24.12
as has anyone who’s passed
through the Rosslyn newsroom.
So far in the current election
cycle, Politico has sparked the
political conversation with legitimate scoops, such as breaking the
allegations of sexual harassment
against former Republican candidate Herman Cain, digging into
campaign spending, and offering
provocative analysis, like Martin’s
attention-grabbing piece last August, “Is Rick Perry dumb?”
Politico also drives the conversation, at times, straight back
to Politico — and not always in a
positive way.
IN A MUCH-discussed May 31
piece leading the site, VandeHei and Allen suggested that
the Times and Post were biased
against Mitt Romney for not
making a bigger deal of new revelations about Obama’s teenage
marijuana use, a topic the president wrote about 17 years ago in
his memoir. They also knocked
the Post for its deeply reported
piece on Romney’s prep
school days that included
disturbing details of bullying — a story that several
Politico reporters and editors themselves aggregated and followed. To
bolster their argument,
VandeHei and Allen