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08 July 2009 10:00 AM
Is Politico the Future of Journalism?
In the fourth issue of Wired magazine, in the fall of 1993, just as the Internet was entering public consciousness, Michael Crichton, the author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, wrote an essay arguing that newspapers were doomed because they were too dumb. As information became cheaper, more plentiful, and easier to get, consumers, he argued, would become ever more immersed in their specific interests and understand that their more generally oriented paper--at least in the matter of a reader's special interest, but also by inference everything else--had no idea what it was talking about.
Sixteen years later, the ultimate result of Crichton's theory about the fallacy of general-interest news--and, as a corollary, the answer to the riddle of who's going to report the news when traditional, general-interest news organizations stop doing it--is, for better and worse, Politico.
Politico is the Web site (and accompanying newspaper) launched by two former Washington Post reporters to cover the 2008 presidential campaign, and which, with 100 or so staffers, is defying all reason and expectations by continuing to prosper beyond the election season. Not only is it, in its way, a direct manifestation of Crichton's observation about flaccid and dumbed-down news, but it is also something rather close to one of those sinister and unstoppable forces in a Crichton novel: more information than you want to know, as well as more than you probably should know and can know, altering the very metabolic rate of the people who supply it and of those who become habituated to trying to know it.
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