Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
Hello! I’m back from paternity leave just in time to talk about the biggest media earthquake of the year (so far): the Washington Post meltdown. For decades, the Post was a journalistic gem with superior coverage of politics. Last week, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos decided to gut roughly a third of the staff after the paper lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the last few years.
Today’s guest is Jim VandeHei, the cofounder of Politico and Axios and a former Post reporter. We talk about the decades-long rise and fall of the Post before zooming out to talk about the most important changes in news media over the past 20 years, the secret of 21st-century media success, and the coming storm of AI.
To read more about Derek’s opening comments on how the future of the news industry is going back to past, check out his Atlantic article on the subject here.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Jim VandeHei about his time at The Washington Post and how media has changed in the past 20 years.
Derek Thompson: Thank you. I want to do something a little bit ambitious, maybe too ambitious, considering that you are my first pancake. This is my first video podcast. I want to tell a 20-year history of The Washington Post that doubles as a 20-year history of changes to the media and political landscape that I know you’ve reflected on in recent essays, since this is the 20-year anniversary of you leaving The Washington Post and starting Politico. And let’s start with the news of the moment. One-third to one-half of the staff at The Washington Post has been laid off. The CEO has resigned. The owner, Jeff Bezos, is nowhere to be seen.
I mean, I really looked hard at what is a larger layoff in modern American newspaper history—one-third to one-half The Washington Post. Very difficult to find, which means you’re in this moment where one of the richest newspaper owners in American history is overseeing one of the largest newspaper layoffs in modern American history. I mean, how calamitous does this seem to you?
Jim VandeHei: I mean, it’s an American tragedy. And I don’t mean to be hyperbolic about it, but it is a tragedy. And I know a lot of conservatives are like, “Oh, The Washington Post doesn’t matter. It’s liberal.” You got to step back. It is an institution that is central to this country and certainly central to the country’s history. At least going back to the early ’70s, it has been literally a central player in some of the biggest dramas and some of the most important reporting on some of the most important topics in, by the way, the most powerful city in the world at probably its peak in power.
So it is a tragedy. And what makes it more a tragedy, it was a foreseen and foreseeable tragedy. That is what breaks my heart. And I worked at The Washington Post 20 years ago. I used to read All the President’s Men or watch All the President’s Men like Joe Theismann would watch Rocky before a Super Bowl. It gets my blood pumping. It’s one of the reasons that I’m a journalist. It’s one of the reasons I have such a romantic attachment to the profession. So it sucks.
At least going back to the early ’70s, [The Washington Post] has been literally a central player in some of the biggest dramas and some of the most important reporting on some of the most important topics in, by the way, the most powerful city in the world at probably its peak in power.
Thompson: Let’s go back to 2006. Twenty years ago, you’re a national political reporter at The Washington Post, and you have this idea. You have this idea that there’s an unfed need among the American news consumer and the American political news consumer in particular. What did you want to build that you thought the Post wasn’t prepared to offer newsreaders at the time?
VandeHei: Yeah, a couple things. At that time, this sounds nuts, but I felt like there was a bigger appetite for more political content that was even deeper and kind of more about the political drama and the interworkings of government than even The Washington Post was producing. And I felt like having been starting to do TV and starting to look at what was taking off on the internet, I didn’t think the Post was as good as the Post thought it was. I thought there were several reporters who were awesome, but I really believed that you were starting to see that if you could put a collection of really good reporters together in one place, you no longer needed a massive army.
And if you could hook those reporters up to the internet and get them on cable TV or get them on network TV, that you could almost instantly have an impact. And that was it. That was end of the observation. At that time, I had just been named to a beat where I could write about anything. The White House, Congress, lobbying is kind of the dream beat. I loved The Washington Post. There’s nothing I didn’t like about it. It was more, we had this idea. The idea was really intoxicating. It took on a life of its own, and we quit to start Politico. And that all happened in about a six-month period.
Thompson: So you leave The Washington Post. Mike Allen leaves Time. You get Maggie Haberman. You get Ben Smith. You pull them on board, just this incredible collection of star journalists. You’ve written that one of the consequences of Politico and its success is the rise of political porn. This by the hour, by the minute obsession with political coverage. And I’m quoting from you here. “We helped create a monster: politics as entertainment and the dominant weapon in a never-ending cultural war. This wasn’t the intent, but we can’t deny the outcome.” Before we continue with the history of The Washington Post and the changes in the media and political landscape, I’d love you to reflect on this, the idea that you helped to create a monster. That sounds pretty bad.
VandeHei: It was. I mean, I don’t know if it was bad, but again, at that point in time, people weren’t obsessing about politics all day. You didn’t really have a mechanism to obsess about politics all day. So then that was the void that we filled. And suddenly, we’re writing. I remember our mantra was “win the morning.” We were trying to produce more content before 8 a.m. than most reporters would produce by the time they woke up and ended their day.
And so we created a new velocity to political journalism. We added more voice to political journalism. We wrote about the people and the power and what was animating it, and it nailed it. It nailed a market need, and it took off like a rocket. Within four months, we’re onstage co-moderating a presidential debate. It was like storybook-level stuff.
But what happened was after everybody was a naysayer and said, “It won’t work,” then it started to work. Then little by little, people started to pay more attention to their traffic. People realized, “Oh my goodness, the topic that drives most traffic is politics.” Then everybody started mass-producing politics. It metastasized, and then suddenly, everybody was consuming politics all day. And the term I used to use is like, it’s OK. Doritos are nice. I like a Dorito. If you have a Dorito once in a while, that’s fine. If you just gorge on them all day, every day, you’re going to be fat, lazy, and useless. And that’s what I worry happened to the general population. And we contributed to that. There’s no doubt.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Jim VandeHei
Producer: Devon Baroldi
