Politics Daily

» see politicsdaily.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Politics Daily went live on 27 April 2009 as AOL's attempt to own Washington coverage outright. By the end of that first month it carried 22 salaried writers, several of them reported to be earning over $100,000, which made it one of the better funded newsrooms anybody had built on the web from a standing start.

Melinda Henneberger ran it, out of Newsweek and before that the New York Times. The people she hired had resumes cut to the same shape: Carl Cannon as executive editor, David Wood off the Baltimore Sun as chief military correspondent, Jill Lawrence out of USA Today, Donna Britt from the Washington Post. AOL was not hiring bloggers. It was buying a newspaper politics desk and putting a domain name in front of it.

The bet was that AOL's front page could hand a national audience to a site nobody had heard of, and that serious reporting would hold that audience once it landed there. The site got twenty two months to prove it.

~ the case file ~

~ what aol was buying ~

In February 2011 an internal document called The AOL Way leaked to Business Insider. It laid out how the company wanted its editorial operation to work: score story ideas by traffic potential and profitability before writing them, raise output per editor, aim at a specific cost per page view. It read like a factory schedule, because that is what it was.

Politics Daily was the opposite arithmetic. A Pulitzer-grade military correspondent filing long pieces about wounded veterans does not clear a cost-per-page-view target, and no version of that memo had room for him.

~ the day of the cuts ~

AOL announced the Huffington Post purchase on 7 February 2011 and closed it on 7 March for $315 million. Three days after that it cut roughly 900 jobs, about 200 of them editorial, and moved something like thirty brands into other properties. Henneberger was in the March cut. Politics Daily went into HuffPost Politics, Urlesque went into HuffPost Comedy, WalletPop went into DailyFinance.

Arianna Huffington was now running the whole editorial operation and had arrived with a politics site of her own that cost a fraction as much to staff. There was never a scenario where the twenty two salaries survived the meeting.

I read the American political web from Ankara in those years the way most people outside the US did, which is to say through whatever got linked. Politics Daily was a name in a byline and not a habit. The thing worth noticing from here was never the coverage, it was that a dial-up company briefly decided to pay reporters like a newspaper.

~ the pulitzer ~

David Wood went across to HuffPost in the merger and spent the next year on a ten-part series about severely wounded troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond the Battlefield won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, the first Pulitzer the Huffington Post ever got, and it went to a reporter AOL had hired for the site it had just closed.

The prize is filed under HuffPost. The newsroom that recruited him has no archive left to file it under.

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