ARLINGTON, VA, 2014—The quirky assignment handed down by CJR’s editors—to imagine the future as though observing the past—brings to mind an old joke about the man who went to a psychologist complaining of strange dreams.

One night, he woke up having dreamed that he had turned into a teepee. The next night’s dream was even more vivid: He had turned into a wigwam. The psychologist furrowed his brow. Then he announced: “I have figured it out. You are two tents!”

As the editor and a co-founder of Politico, I am not too tense. Since our publication launched online and in print in January 2007, we have prospered far beyond our early expectations. Fueled by intense interest in the 2008 presidential campaign, our traffic soared and we were regularly in the top dozen of Editor & Publisher’s monthly listing of most-trafficked newspaper Web sites. Politico is growing by every measure that counts to me: newsroom size, traffic, ad revenue, journalistic reputation, and impact. Our strategy is to be in the top tier of news organizations covering Washington and national politics, and to do so as a self-sustaining, profit-generating business.

But this doesn’t mean I sleep well. Like the man in the joke, I have anxiety dreams of my own. My visions of the future-past can be pleasant at times, and quite unsettling at others.

Let me take you inside my own version of Two Tents.


Tent One

It is five years from now, early 2014, and Politico is a major player in the media covering Obama’s second term. From this vantage point, the fears and turmoil that beset the industry in 2008 and 2009 seem distant, even a little overwrought. Yes, there was agonizing retrenchment at many news organizations, but it was matched by impressive growth at other places.

Journalism is thriving in ways that only the most bullish—and seemingly Pollyannaish—voices were predicting five years ago. As some of the brashest bulls, those of us at Politico take particular satisfaction that we are among the success stories. We proved that niche publications, producing highly focused journalism for an audience with intense interest in particular subjects, can achieve the same ends—both editorially and financially—that in the past were the sole province of a handful of big newspapers and broadcast networks.

Politico is making money from advertisers who know we are read closely in Washington and by a politically sophisticated audience around the country and the world. We have a staff of eighty reporters and editors, roughly the size of The New York Times’s Washington bureau during its glory days.

We do not have a network of reporters around the world; other publications have sprung up to meet that need. But that does not mean we don’t leave the newsroom. We spent millions on travel over the past five years. What’s more, in the old days, a lot of travel money got wasted—by reporters who wrote maybe one story, buried deep in the paper, after a week on the road. Since our audience is just like we are—political junkies all—they have limitless appetite for our stories. I’ll confess that I had been a skeptic of the craze for multimedia, but it turns out that our video dispatches from the road have been wildly popular. Our daily Web TV program started out a little cheesy, perhaps, but damned if it does not routinely get two hundred thousand viewers a day.

More important, our success as a business means we have the freedom to do longer, investigative and narrative work, rather than just chase the story of the day and the traffic that comes with it. Some people once believed that there would be no market for this kind of work in the new-media world, but our publisher, Robert Allbritton, bet against them, and he was right.

A lot of what people once feared, in fact, turned out not to be true. The media world that I grew up in, from the day I arrived as a summer intern at The Washington Post in 1985 at age twenty-one, is gone and I was very sorry to see it go. But it turned out the sky was not falling. The sun was rising.

John F. Harris is the editor-in-chief of Politico.