Gabriel Sherman’s profile of Politico caused quite a stir this week. Ezra Klein wrings his hands:
The thesis of my earlier post is that the Politico treats politics much like ESPN treats sports. It uses that as the connective tissue that makes both stimulus and Bristol Palin interesting. It’s for fans. You might even say it’s for politicos. And what the outlet is brilliant at doing is situating itself at the center of their world. It’s closer to the nerve center of the average news junkie than, I think, any other outlet going today. Its startlingly rapid rise reflects that.
But in unbundling politics from news, just as newspapers are (unhappily) unbundling news from classifieds, we’re getting to a point where it’s not clear what subsidizes the articles that don’t sell: The long pieces on urban decline in Baltimore or Medicare reimbursement fraud. Politico has figured out that maximal efficiency for a political news operations doesn’t include those stories. Other newspapers are figuring out the same thing, and foreign bureaus are closing and niche beats — health, labor, etc — are being eliminated. This is not a story confined to the Politico.
The Dish 