INSIDE
THE CULT
dig into the financials and verify
that claim and there have long
been doubts about whether Politico actually has earnings putting
the company in the black.
Since wealthy people have
been known to bankroll moneylosing media outlets for the influence they carry, there have also
been suggestions that Politico is
a vanity project for Robert Allbritton, son of local media titan
Joe Allbritton, who once also
owned the now-defunct Washington Star newspaper as well as
the scandal-plagued Riggs Bank.
Allbritton wasn’t available
to comment before this article
closed, but Harris contends that
Allbritton cares about Politico being financially successful.
“It’s not monopoly money for
him, it’s real,” Harris says.
A focus on a paid subscription
model with Pro suggests that Allbritton wants to increase revenue
rather than spend lavishly on
more brand-name political writers
for the main, free site. After all,
Politico didn’t rush out to replace
Smith with a top-tier writer and is
instead adding writers to produce
more policy-driven stories.
There are, of course, non-financial benefits to owning Politico
for Allbritton and Fred Ryan, Allbritton’s president and Politico’s
president and chief executive.
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06.24.12
Ryan, who worked in the Reagan
White House, also serves as chairman of the Board of Trustees for
the Ronald Reagan Presidential
Foundation and Chairman of the
White House Historical Association Board.
Two journalists who helped
run Allbritton’s highly anticipated hyper-local 2010 venture
about the Washington area,
TBD.com, suggest that Allbritton and Ryan want influence and
were willing to accept Politico’s
early losses to gain that foothold.
Digital First Media editor-inchief Jim Brady, who helped conceive TBD.com as general manager but left after just three months
online, said he and his staff
believed they had a “five-year
runway” to work toward profitability. But that never happened:
layoffs hit the 35-person staff
within the site’s first year and