Why Nobody Trusts the News — And How to Fix It

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Ed Elson (0:45)

Welcome to the Prof G Markets founder series. I'm Ed Elson. The media industry has been reinventing itself for decades. In the 90s, the internet fundamentally changed and the way our news was distributed, which reshaped the economics of journalism. Fast forward to today, AI is forcing the industry through another transformation, and this one may be even more consequential. Newsrooms everywhere are grappling with how AI is changing the way people discover and consume information. At the same time, the technology has made trust more valuable than ever, perhaps creating a renewed appreciation for reporting done by real journalists.

Our next guest has been at the center of these shifts for more than two decades. He helped pioneer digital journalism, and today he leads one of the most influential news organizations in the world. So we wanted to get his take on some of the most existential questions that media organizations are contending with today, such as how can organizations respond to declines in search traffic? How should newsrooms use AI without compromising trust? And what will the next generation of digital media companies actually look like? This is my conversation with Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO of Axios.

Jim, great to see you and thank you for joining me. I want to start at the beginning because actually you've co-founded two very successful media organizations. The one before Axios was Politico.

Can you take us back to that year, when you started that company, and then take us through to today?

Jim VandeHei (2:22)

I think the origin of Politico is in some ways poetic, in some ways kind of the beginning of the end of an era, right? So if you go back to 20 years ago, it's early 2007 is when Politico launched. Before that, I had been a political writer and the White House correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post. Never fancied myself an entrepreneur. We had this idea. We kind of saw that the web was changing the world. We wanted to be part of the change and not be part of the institution. So we launched Politico.

Almost to the day that we launched Politico, the iPhone comes out, Facebook starts to take off, Twitter starts to take off, Google's surging, streaming takes off. So like 2007 is a really important year in history now looking back. And so we were able to ride what was a massive technological shift, a massive consumer shift. We probably pioneered kind of speed and voice in journalism.

Politico was a rocket ship. I mean, I think at four months after we launched the company, I was on stage co-moderating a presidential debate that we co-sponsored, unheard of, for a new media company. We, you know, as the Obama-Clinton race, so there was a lot of national, international interest in it. And the company never stopped growing. It, to this day, does quite well. In the time, we were journalists with an idea, and then we were entrepreneurs that made it happen, and then you have to actually run a company. That's where I learned to be a CEO, learned to lead. Eventually, we started Axios. We had a great 10-year run. The second company grew, we learned how to run a business. We proved that the digital model could work. I think we created a model that others, not long after, would try to copy in other areas. The information in technology, now Punchbowl up on Capitol Hill. I think most of the successful publications of the last decade kind of took that model, and a lot of those folks worked for us. So, it's very gratifying to see the family tree extend. And then, we did that 10 years, and we had a great run.

I'd say after 10 years, the issue that we had with information consumption was like, wow, politics is important. It's not everything. And if you're a smart person, our observation was you're going to suddenly need to know a lot more across more topics when more stuff's getting pumped into your head. And we wanted to solve for that, and that's where we came up with the idea of Axios and came up with this idea of smart brevity, which is what is the most efficient way to deliver smart content to busy professional readers. The architecture with smart brevity, this idea of what is new, why does it matter? Put your most important information in bullets, make sure it's in hierarchical order, make sure it's reader first, it's all about the consumer, not what the journalist wants. And that model for that moment really worked, and Axios is now almost 10 years old. Interestingly, almost the exact same day in January of next year, Politico will turn 20, Axios will turn 10 And so I'm sure there will be a lot of reflection on what that means in digital media in DC.