Axios founders reflect on two decades of disruption

Twenty years after leaving Washington Post and Time to start their own ventures, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen say the bet they made on the internet has permanently dismantled the traditional news industry.

In a retrospective column published on Tuesday, the founders of Axios and architects of Politico describe how the trends they embraced propelled them to the top of the media ecosystem – and helped usher in what they call a chaotic “post-news era”.

The column argues that the same forces that rewarded speed, focus and personality over institutions also fractured audiences, accelerated politics into entertainment and eroded a shared sense of truth.

VandeHei and Allen offer a candid post-mortem of the revolution they helped spark with the launch of Politico in January 2007. The past 20 years, they argue, were not a gradual evolution but a deliberate upending of how information is produced and consumed – from broad to niche, slow to instant and institutional to individual.

They point first to what they call the “death of the day”. In 2007, editors still held stories for Sunday editions and major scoops could dominate the conversation for days. By fixating on “winning the morning” – a strategy The New Republic once labelled “the Scoop Factory” – they compressed the news cycle from days to minutes.
“We calculated that most people did most of their reading in the early hours,” they wrote. “Our mentality was to beat the competition before they even got in the game.” Politico’s morning Playbook emails remain must-reads in the capitals of the world.

The consequence, they concede, is relentless acceleration. “You’re lucky to hold someone’s attention for an hour or two.”

Central to that shift was turning the newsletter into the new front page. Products such as Playbook and later Axios AM reframed email from a marketing afterthought into what the founders call “Washington’s town square”. The wager was that influential, time-poor readers prized efficiency, voice and insider detail over the authority of legacy brands.

That emphasis on “smart brevity” and personality-led reporting, they argue, demonstrated that personal connection could outweigh institutional prestige, a dynamic that paved the way for the current explosion of Substack writers and independent creators.

The power shift also elevated journalists themselves into brands. VandeHei and Allen criticise what they describe as the “arrogance” of legacy institutions that believed the masthead mattered more than the byline.
“We bet that the most talented journalists were bigger than the brands,” they wrote.

That bet, they argue, helped create star reporters such as Maggie Haberman and Ben Smith and normalised the idea of journalists as entrepreneurs. They trace a lineage from Politico to newer niche outlets founded by defectors from large organisations, including The Information, Puck, Semafor and Punchbowl News.

The column, however, is not a simple victory lap. VandeHei and Allen devote considerable space to what they call the “darker legacy” of the model they helped popularise. Chief among them is the “rise of political porn”, an unintended consequence of treating politics as an hourly obsession driven by personalities and conflict. In chasing constant engagement, they write, journalism helped turn governance into entertainment and fuelled perpetual culture wars.

They also describe a “fragmentation of truth”. By proving that niche audiences could be more valuable than mass ones, the industry splintered into self-contained information bubbles. “Consumers drifted into their own bubbles and realities,” they wrote. “Politicians exploited this fracturing, and news morphed into information warfare.”

Despite that diagnosis, the founders remain bullish on the startup ethos. It is now easier, they argue, to build new brands from scratch than to rescue “fading” legacy institutions, noting that Politico rose as the old guard declined.

“We alone didn’t start this fire,” they wrote, citing social media and entrenched newsroom cultures. “But … we surely lit or fanned it – then had front-row seats to witness the blaze.”