In Jim VandeHei’s view, there’s a certain “seduction” in finding star reporting talent. The Axios CEO recalls reading Alex Thompson’s work at Politico, where he delivered scoops that were “tough” on Joe Biden, and thinking, Man, I like that. VandeHei and his cofounder Mike Allen invited Thompson for dinner, where they attempted to persuade him to take the leap. While initially unsuccessful, the pair didn’t relent, reaching out to Thompson every month and telling him, essentially, “Follow the light. You’re going to come here. You were born to work for us. You just don’t realize it yet,” VandeHei recalls. It took awhile—nearly two years from that first dinner—but Thompson did, indeed, follow the light.
I caught up with VandeHei and Allen, both veterans of The Washington Post and key players in launching Politico, to discuss the state of political media ahead of Donald Trump’s second presidency, as news outlets jockey for talent to cover the incoming administration. Allen and VandeHei have had a hand in fostering and mentoring high-profile journalists like the New York Times’ Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Semafor founder Ben Smith, Punchbowl News cofounders John Bresnahan, Jake Sherman, and Anna Palmer, among many others. The trait all these reporters have in common is they “reflect a passion, hunger, appetite, desire to be the very best,” Allen tells me. “What you’re looking for is the common genetic code. They love what they do. You can see it,” VandeHei adds. Still, he says, “I look around the city, it’s not like there’s 100 people that I would love to go hire. There’s like three.”
The first time the pair met Swan, for instance, VandeHei and Allen remember “instantly” clicking with the political reporter. “Within 20 minutes, probably 10 minutes of talking, we stopped the conversation,” VandeHei recalls, and told him, “You were born to work for us.” VandeHei says he would still “do anything” to get Swan and Haberman back, but he’s not under any illusions that either are leaving the Times anytime soon. Regardless, he holds out hope that both “will one day again work for us,” he tells me, “because I believe, all the great people should reunite at some point.”
VandeHei says Axios is prepared to cover Trump’s White House “clinically, fearlessly, not emotionally” and recently recruited Marc Caputo, a deeply sourced, Florida-based reporter who also put in time at Politico and was most recently at the Bulwark. “With President Trump, it’s very situational, improvisational, and he’ll respond to someone who called him on his cell phone, somebody he ran into at the buffet at Mar-a-Lago. They can plant an idea in his mind. It can result in an announcement or an appointment the next day,” Allen notes. Caputo, as “somebody who knows these players, is in constant communication with them, knows how they think, knows how MAGA world acts, that becomes infinitely valuable,” he adds.
VandeHei contends that some organizations want to cover Trump’s term as a “celebration” and others want to cover his presidency as a “crime beat,” whereas Axios aims to cover him “like a doctor, clinically. We’re not hyperventilating, we’re not trying to put our fingers on the scale.” The first time around, he says, some in the media “got way too damn emotional,” arguing that much of the industry veered away from its principles of “trying to be fair, trying to be fearless on both sides.”
White House reporters are bracing for another tumultuous term in office, expecting a “shock and awe” rollout of executive orders. Trump has promised to carry out mass deportations, one of dozens of Day 1 promises he made on the campaign trail. For the news media, there are indications of upcoming changes in the West Wing, from the physical location of the press secretary’s office to the likelihood of new faces in the briefing room.
VandeHei and Allen say they’d rather their staff not be in the briefing room at all. “We tell our reporters across all topics, ‘If you look around and there are two or more other reporters there, you can leave,’” Allen tells me. “There’s no news to be had.”
“Where the press operation sits or what they say or do about the reporters is really meaningless to us if our reporters are doing their job,” VandeHei says, adding, “We beg our reporters to never go to a White House press briefing…. That’s a good chunk of your day lost.”
While news organizations typically reassign staff or make hires when transitioning from a campaign to covering an incoming administration, this postelection period has been especially frenetic. The Atlantic poached Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker from The Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal also picked up Josh Dawsey from the Post, alongside Meridith McGraw, Gavin Bade, and Olivia Beavers from Politico. And while Caputo joined Axios from the Bulwark, Sophia Cai left VandeHei and Allen’s current outlet for Politico, which also nabbed Dasha Burns from NBC News. Matea Gold and Tyler Pager both decamped from the Post to The New York Times, as Washington editor and White House reporter, respectively.
“I don’t know if I would overinterpret it,” VandeHei tells me of the industry churn, “but there’s definitely a lot of people moving around.” Allen argues that while there appears to be more movement than usual, it’s “amplified this time by the changes that are happening in the media business and the media ecosystem.”
VandeHei agrees, citing reporters fleeing the Post because they are “unhappy” with the newspaper’s leadership. While admitting he has no particular insight into CEO and publisher Will Lewis’s plan for the Post, VandeHei considers their recent talent drain significant. “You can’t argue that a lot of people that were good, that were there, are no longer there,” VandeHei says. “So, that’s an issue.” He also takes issue with the Post’s recent decision to “stop the dedicated practice of publicity for our journalism across broadcast and traditional media outlets,” and cut down their PR team in lieu of a “star talent unit.”
“I think that’s crazy,” VandeHei says. “We want to get our people out there on social media platforms, on traditional media platforms, as much as we can, and then we benefit by them benefiting.” But ultimately, Lewis has been “clear that he wants to radically change the Post, wants to change its brand,” VandeHei notes. “If he can hire really talented people who can do that, then maybe he’s got a master plan that the rest of us just aren’t aware of yet.”
“And on the flip side, The Wall Street Journal is very smartly beefing up,” picking up some of the Post’s talent, Allen says, praising editor in chief Emma Tucker for “building a bureau in her image.” While the pair don’t know Tucker incredibly well, they have met briefly a couple of times, and within 20 minutes of talking to her, VandeHei recalls thinking, “I’d work for Emma.” She has “single-handedly made that publication exponentially more interesting and more vital to my daily consumption needs than before,” he adds.
When asked about what the future holds for their former haunt, VandeHei mutters, “I hate talking about Politico,” before acknowledging that the outlet is “still a player in town,” and continues to break news. “Politico has the same challenge that all of us have, which is, can you stockpile enough top tier talent that on a day-to-day basis are writing things that people in positions of power have to read and have to reckon with?” VandeHei argues. “So the measuring stick that any publication should be held to is, are you doing that? Do you have enough people to deliver the goods?”
“The one publication I know a lot about is us,” VandeHei says. “I just feel very good about our Hill team. I feel very good about our White House team.” Allen chimes in, “If you were to deconstruct why Axios wins, one of our biggest differentiators, one of our superpowers, is hyper clarity in our mission and what we deliver. With the organizations we’ve been talking about, if they have crystal clarity about their mission, they’re going to win.”
VandeHei gestures toward the Axios office windows—which have a direct view of Washington DC—and says, “If you think about this town, this might be the most electric moment in the history of Washington. Truly, it is the center and will be the center for at least two years of government. It’s the center of now, business, and the center of media.” From VandeHei’s perch in his outlet’s Arlington headquarters, the way to effectively report how the capital shapes the country going forward is having “domain expertise” in government, business, and media in order “to be able to truly explain to the world what’s happening in the city. And I think that’s where we’re unique.”
Given the saturation of news content, he says, “It’s hard to get people to pay attention to anything.” And, he adds, “If you aren’t breaking news, if you’re not offering a new analytical or conceptual framework, you’re just writing stuff, and the market for stuff is gone.”
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The post “We’re Not Hyperventilating”: Behind Axios’s Clinical Approach to Covering Donald Trump’s Second Term appeared first on Vanity Fair.
