In the days since the New York Times crowned Politico reporter Mike Allen “THE MAN THE WHITE HOUSE WAKES UP TO,” there’s been endless debate about just how much influence he wields or whether his considerable talents might be better deployed on other journalistic pursuits.
From the point of view of entrepreneurial journalism, I find myself more interested in what it takes to satisfy the audience described by that headline. It’s a community not limited to the White House staff, obviously, and includes anyone whose job or personal passion is linked to the issues, personalities and quirks of Beltway politics, government and media.
Scan the “Playbook” daily briefing that Allen sends out to more than 30,000 e-mail subscribers, and you’ll get a sense of how he caters to those constituencies.
It’s hardly a new concept. The Hotline, owned since 1996 by National Journal, has served that market for more than 20 years. The difference is that Playbook reads like a serendipitous early morning e-mail from Allen and The Hotline provides a much more structured, institutional approach.
The question for local journalists and media execs looking at Playbook becomes: How do we sustain a media enterprise that audiences turn to — at dawn or otherwise — when they need reliable, engaging, actionable information about topics that really matter to them?
Allen as community builder and revenue driver
Deconstructing Mark Leibovich’s 8,200-word piece suggests some key characteristics of Allen as entrepreneurial journalist. Unlike some of the media pioneers who find themselves selling ads as well as covering communities, Allen enjoys the luxury of a cleaner focus on his copy. But with a salary The Times places above $250,000 and Politico’s reportedly strong revenue base, Allen’s brand of innovation appears safely described as entrepreneurial.
What makes him so? He’s obviously a good aggregator and curator. But he’s also figured out how to cultivate what Leibovich characterizes as “friend-sources.” He’s fast. He’s entertaining. He’s selective. He’s an authoritative voice. He’s got some personality. He’s a promoter and a community builder and, in the process, a revenue driver.
Each of those is freighted with some journalistic peril. In re-shaping the traditional reporter-source relationship to friend-source, how might he put his independent judgment in jeopardy? What might he sacrifice in accuracy and context in the pursuit of speed? And what are the revenue implications of such issues as credibility and trust?
From what I can see as a new reader of Playbook, Politico is taking some well-placed risks in pursuit of the sort of innovation that can serve audience and publisher alike.
As someone who last worked as a Washington reporter when a Bible-thumping president was threatening to whip Teddy Kennedy’s ass, I hardly qualify as a member of the Beltway community addressed by Playbook.
But there I was Tuesday morning, reading Playbook in bed on my phone (just like Katie Couric, according to Leibovich), and Allen tips me off to the birthday of a friend.
So, what’s the impact of having your birthday noted in the most popular early morning document in the in-boxes of Washington’s power elite?
Not much, apparently. My friend responded to my birthday greetings with a late night e-mail reporting that her 16 hours of exposure in Playbook had resulted in exactly one birthday message (mine) and that, oh yeah, Allen misspelled her name.
Playbook and its place in the media landscape
But that’s a nit, especially in the context of an audience that’s probably quite willing to pay the price of an occasional typo or dropped word en route to juicy excerpts from Laura Bush’s new book.
Thursday’s edition underlines Allen’s friends-and-family tone, which offers a sharp contrast with the snark of so much of what’s written about the politics-government-media trinity.
With a link to the reporter’s bio, Allen writes: “Who was POTUS referring to when he said during his remarks to the travel pool about Air Force One, ‘Okay? One more. I’ll give him the last question since this is his first ride on the plane’?” The newbie, Allen reports, is NPR’s Ari Shapiro.
In my limited read so far, Playbook appears more inclined to pass along White House announcements of personnel shifts than to provide hard-edged analysis of who’s up and down and why (see the White House memo about press office promotions in Thursday’s Playbook).
I’m guessing there’s pretty high tolerance among Allen’s readers for his promotion of Politico copy and events — and for the in-column text advertising set off only with asterisks and generating what the Times estimates at $15,000 a week in revenue.
Critics accusing The Times of exaggerating Allen’s importance by making him its magazine coverboy are missing the point, in my view. Allen and his Playbook warrant all that play and more as a snapshot of the emerging 21st Century media landscape.
In the same Sunday edition, editors of the New York Times Book Review provided their own glimpse of an earlier news era with a cover review of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century” by Alan Brinkley.
In an editor’s note, Times executive editor Bill Keller wonders “what Luce would make of the current media landscape.”
In his review, Keller notes that, “in Brinkley’s view, the legacy of Luce lies not in any great influence over America politics or policy, but in the creation of new forms of media that — in their day, before their eclipse by television and then the Internet — ‘helped transform the way many people experienced news and culture.’ “
In a messier, more modest way, Allen is up to the same thing.
