Protocol

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

~ the obit ~

Protocol was written for the people who make technology policy in Washington. i am an engineer in Ankara, which is a different job that happens to use a lot of the same words. The trade press i actually open has code in it.

It launched in february 2020 out of Robert Allbritton's Capitol News Company, the same building that produced Politico, and its declared beat was the people and the politics of technology. The timing was almost too good to be true. A newsroom about how technology and government collide opened a few weeks before both of them were handed a pandemic to run.

Allbritton kept it structurally separate from Politico, with its own business side and its own editors, which is exactly why it could be closed later without disturbing anything else in the company. About sixty people worked there. It ran a daily flagship newsletter called Source Code with a set of narrower ones underneath, and for two years the model looked plausible, because enterprise technology companies have advertising budgets and not many credible places to put them.

In october 2021 Axel Springer bought Politico for more than a billion dollars, and Protocol came along inside the deal. Fourteen months later the German owner looked at a tech advertising market that had gone cold in the same year the industry began laying people off in public, and decided the revenue shortfall was not worth carrying.

None of this reached me directly. The nearest its subject matter ever came was through export rules written in Washington that decide which hardware can be bought here at all. That is the honest distance: a publication about the politics of technology, reported entirely from inside one country's politics, still describing the constraints on a workbench in Ankara.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the shape of the business ~

Protocol was built on the theory that Politico's model would transfer. Politico works because lobbyists and staffers will pay real money for information that arrives before their meeting, and because the advertisers who want to reach them have no substitute. The tech version assumed a similar audience of people whose jobs depend on knowing what a regulator or a platform is about to do.

The audience existed. The advertising did not hold. Tech marketing budgets are cyclical in a way that defense and pharma budgets are not, and when the cycle turned in 2022 the buyers left all at once. A newsroom of sixty people needs a floor under it, and there was no subscription business built underneath in time to be that floor.

~ the actual end ~

Staff were told at an all-hands on tuesday 15 november 2022 that the site would stop publishing on thursday. Thursday was the 17th. Everyone stayed on the payroll until 16 december with eight weeks of severance after that, which is a softer landing than most digital newsrooms get, and it does not change the fact that the whole staff learned the date in the same room at the same minute.

Source Code kept arriving for a few weeks after everything else stopped. That is a strange thing to have in your inbox, a newsletter still publishing from an outlet whose website had already gone still.

~ the long tail ~

In april 2023 a former Protocol editor bought part of the company's email list and started something new on top of it. That is what a newsletter operation is worth when it is broken up: the addresses. It was the only piece of the business that came out of the closure still functioning.

The plan announced at the time was to leave the archive standing rather than switch it off, which is more than most closed newsrooms are given. Whether that holds is a question about somebody's hosting bill, and questions of that kind only have one long-run answer.

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