“We used to say Politico was the ESPN of politics. I’d love for this to be the ESPN of technology.” That’s Politico owner, which will mark the arrival of Allbritton’s second major journalism gamble when it launches sometime early next year. “This has been on my mind for a long time,” he said. “We really want to look at technology as a base of power.”
It seems a heavy lift, given the number of tech sites that have flowered over the past decade or so. At the same time, Politico was greeted with skepticism when it debuted in 2007 as a small, scrappy, and relentless daily digest for the Beltway class. Twelve years later, it’s almost as much of an establishment creature as the legacy institutions it set out to disrupt, with a 750-person global headcount spread across six countries and eight U.S. states .
Now he wants to replicate Politico’s playbook, as it were, with Protocol, which he will officially announce this week. The digital-only venture plans to lift off with roughly the same level of manpower and investment as its predecessor did more than a decade ago: several dozen journalists and business employees and a little more than $10 million under the hood. “I would love for this to be as big as, if not larger than, Politico is right now,” Allbritton told me.
Does the media really need yet another publication going balls to the wall on tech? Are we not already sated by Recode andand the Verge and the Information and Bloomberg and Business Insider and Axios and a million blogs and the nation’s three largest newspapers, each of which has significantly expanded its technology coverage over the past couple of years? Can Protocol really deliver something unique that the rest of those players do not? Absolutely, its founders say.
The rest of the tech press corps seems likely to beg to differ, which is why I asked Grieve for an example of a hypothetical Protocol story to illustrate how the site aims to stand out from the pack. “Think of the iPhone launch a few weeks ago,” he said. “Lots and lots of people did stories about the three cameras, and the dog selfies, and all of that consumer focus.
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