Politico and TBD: Breaking the Mold

It was the organization we were all waiting for, the name in news everybody we talked to or bumped into just had to mention. Simply put, Politico.
We were first introduced, however, to TCU alumnus Steve Buttry. Buttry, the Director of Community Engagement for TBD. TBD (literally standing for To Be Determined) is a website and television partnership that provides local D.C. metro area news as opposed to the national politics within D.C. which is covered by Politico.
Innovation, no surprise here, was the key to TBD’s rising popularity and website traffic. To the best of Buttry’s knowledge, TBD.com and WJLA (news channel 8) are the first TV/Web partners. Buttry believed the model would work better than what has become the more traditional newspaper/Web partnership because the TV/Web news cycle runs in a similar time frame.
TBD.com has also changed the model for aggregating news, including a partnership with bloggers by directing traffic to their websites, sharing ad revenue with these bloggers as well helping these bloggers make their own ad revenue.
We had a chance to meet some of the boots on the ground at TBD, and the level of community engagement, especially with new media, really stuck out to me. The concept that Twitter had a far greater impact when the people following your tweets actually knew you personally made sense. Some of the TBD.com staff literally will go out to coffee shops and happy hours to engage with the community. Dan Victory, a Community Host for TBD, said they already have 3,500 Twitter followers.
Allbritton Communications Company is what puts TBD and Politico under the same umbrella (they share the same tech staff and office space).
Jim VandeHei, Executive Editor of Politico, explained how the journalism business model made no sense. Why does the best talent in the newsroom receive only about 10 percent more in salary than the worst reporter in the newsroom?
I liked the New York Yankees model he used to explain how Politico branded itself as a quick, credible and reliable news source. Because Allbritton is the parent company of Politico, they simply were able to pay premium salaries to the best reporters and correspondents in the business. Politico is in some sense a Washington politics all-star team; if you can’t beat them, buy’em out. VandeHei firmly believed that there wasn’t a price tag you could put on the best, such as Mike Allen, who is now Politico Chief White House Correspondent.
The simple concept of specialization almost makes too much sense, but especially in D.C., it is a perfect way for Politico to stay ahead of the game and focused on just Washington politics. Pay for the best political reporters and correspondents and focus on politics, and it will and has created a buzz in D.C.—which is why the Politico business model is now being copied.
VandeHei knows that organizations like the National Journal could take the momentum from Politico if they simply do a better job at covering Washington politics.
This healthy competition seems to benefit one demographic the most, the audience and the readers who care about politics in Washington.