How important is it to have trust in the media?
I mean, if you think about this moment,
you basically have two groups of people
living in two of their own realities.
So you, you basically have this loss of trust.
For us as a media company,
if you don't have trust, you have nothing.
Hey, I'm Sarah Franklin and welcome to Connections,
where we hear from some of
the most innovative leaders in marketing.
For most people launching one successful media company
is a career defining achievement.
But for Jim Vandehei Politico was only the beginning.
So we came to Washington DC to learn about his journey
in storytelling and marketing.
I grew up in a small town, Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
I was always a good writer
and I fell in love with journalism
and very quickly decided I wanted to be
And if you want to be a political journalist
you've got one place to come and it was here.
Basically started my career covering Congress.
And I always assumed everyone here was really smart.
You went to these fancy schools.
And I was like, you're not that bright.
Then you meet members of Congress,
you realize you're really not that bright.
And it just really gives you this confidence
that whatever, I could do this, I can navigate it.
And I was always fascinated with power.
And so I spent my early career really focused on leadership
and really becoming a student of power
and a student of institutions.
And so then you worked at the Journal,
like what did you learn from your time there?
Developed a lot of competence as a writer
and just sort of a thinker about the city.
It's an interesting small town,
even though it feels like a big town.
But I learned a lot about writing, about communicating,
And I liked covering the presidency,
which is what I did for the Wall Street Journal
and then the Washington Post.
Kind of thought that's what I was going to do
You fly around with the president,
you get to interview him.
It was really cool, but there was always part of me
I was like this is neat, but it never really felt like, ah,
And then one day we decided that
we wanted to become entrepreneurs
and it really took a huge shift at that point.
So what inspired you to found Politico?
Basically what we were thinking is we're sitting at the
Washington Post and I was like, I'm pretty good at this.
And I know that people are really good at this.
All the action was moving to the web.
Like what if we just created the New York Yankees
of journalism and started our own company.
And five months later we went live with Politico.
It went from getting excited about an idea
And what was so different about your approach to content?
Our theory was there wasn't enough political coverage.
It wasn't written with enough voice
and it didn't have enough immediacy to it.
And we're like, let's get voice, let's give expertise.
Let's go deeper and let's meet the consumer's need
for a lot of political coverage.
Within three months we're on stage
co-moderating a presidential debate.
Took it from nothing to about 600 employees,
It kept being so successful that we had time.
And I think we were humble enough to realize how bad we were
And then became I think quite good at running companies.
But at the beginning like we were terrible.
I always say everything I learned about leadership,
I learned by screwing it up royally at the beginning.
I learned, yeah, I think so.
And then that wasn't your last stop.
At some point you saw that the way
people consume news was changing.
How did that prompt you to start Axios?
It was clear that because technology was speeding
everything up you and me and everyone around us was going to
need to know more about technology and China and AI
and politics and healthcare.
And so the question is well, that's a lot,
And our theory was to have to have really smart coverage
and you have to radically change how,
the efficiency of how content is delivered.
And we called it smart brevity,
which is people who have real expertise, who are smart,
but then with a huge emphasis
on making information consumption,
starting with the written word, way more efficient.
Journalists tend to be very self-indulgent
and we kind of write a lot of words
'cause that's what really important smart people do.
Well it turns out no one wants to read your damn words.
So we really studied those habits closely.
Almost everybody was reading almost nothing.
And it didn't matter if you were a CEO.
Just reading the headlines.
You could look at that and be dismissive of humanity
or you could say, wait maybe the consumer's right.
And us as a journalist were wrong.
What if you made those headlines, those leads,
the why it matters as useful
and as information packed as humanly possible?
Could you change consumer habits so that they're suddenly
getting way more information
in a way shorter period of time?
Convert them into essentially addicts to your product
because it's so much more efficient than the competition.
and it turned out the bet was right thankfully,
But it was built on that fundamental premise
that still animates a company today.
So you have the brevity, you have smart brevity,
but then what about how it looks?
Very important and not my natural gift,
but I would say I became very obsessed with it.
If you're trying to take that information
and you're trying to display it fundamentally on the screen
Like a small, yeah, small form factor.
How do you make that as visually appealing
And you do that by getting rid of the clutter,
making it feel like totally intuitive,
but also not intimidating.
So you get rid of pop-up ads, you get rid of banner ads,
you get rid of all the things that we as media companies did
to monetize the consumer,
but that kind of sucked for the consumer.
And our bet was well if you do that,
then you'll get them to consume your content.
You'll use that same logic for ads.
Yeah Marie Kondo all the content
and then you're worried 'cause your,
your revenue stream could go away if you take that.
Took the risk.
And it worked.
We calculated it 'cause I,
what we knew that people would engage
with that type of content.
You study the data and then you make bets and you try,
you hope that you can get the right people around you
to execute on your vision.
And that's how you get a successful show
So as a CEO of Axios, you have great content,
but how important is it that that's marketed out there?
Like if you have this great thing and you drop in the forest
You've got to have almost like
a guerrilla mentality towards marketing.
You want to maximize the value of your IP,
which is in our case it's that content.
It's why I think like marketing and communicators,
like this is your moment.
It wasn't that big of a deal five or 10 years ago.
It was a pretty simple job.
I now think it's one of the most complex jobs at a company.
If you can't communicate internally to your employees,
If you can't communicate externally to your shareholders
or to your customers, you're not going to have a good business.
your goal was to put the audience first.
What does that look like in practice?
it is literally the first words of our manifesto.
Is this really in the best interest of, of the user?
And sometimes it means surrendering short-term profit
to make sure that you're serving that user.
And our theory has always been if you do that
They can sniff out a phony.
They know if you're authentically trying to get them
to the closest approximation of the truth.
And that means getting rid of some ads
That might mean we don't have a pay wall.
And it's just being kind of ruthless with yourself
about these are the principles we're going to live by,
You've written about the war for attention.
What would your advice be for content creators
who are trying to as you say, like bust through the noise?
One, use fewer words, use stronger words,
realize you've got maybe two or three seconds
for you to grab me or not.
So be very thoughtful about what,
what is my introduction, what's my headline,
And then make sure that like you've,
you're packing what you want them to know
Don't make them guess, don't make them work.
You want to pull people through it
and make sure that you're calibrating your voice
based on the environment that you're
trying to communicate in.
you always have to be ready for change.
And what types of change do you see with storytelling
I mean, everything changes so quick right now, right
in terms of having all these different platforms.
I think one of the big tricks is going to be,
at least for the short term,
you do have the people who live in two realities
and you can't cut off half of your customers.
So I think one of the trends is
you're going to have to understand, even as a business,
how do you communicate with someone in rural America
which might be different than someone in urban America?
I think that's a big change.
I think the other is once we get to some progress
I do think there's going to be
a whole nother way to communicate
that gives you an additional layer of intimacy
without being physically present.
The world's not going back to the way it was.
Like, we're all now going to kind of live
wherever we want to live, work wherever we want to work.
And not for a lot of people
ever have to be physically present.
And that's just going to require
a whole nother layer of communicating
both in terms of how do you recruit and retain talent.
But then how do you connect people,
especially at your company,
who might not have a physical connection?
And I think it's going to be a real tough one.
You've dealt with a lot of change.
Do you think that we're done with the change
or do you think change is constant?
Yeah, I think we're in the middle of a long period
I think people are underestimating the intensity
of the volatility to come.
What do you think is going to happen?
I just think that a bunch of things
have been set in motion that lead towards somewhere
between volatility and chaos.
You've got massive amounts of misinformation
that can move at scale at almost no cost.
You just have a tribalism to your politics
and an emotionalism of your politics.
That's going to be hard to put back in the bottle.
You've got the climate changing that is obviously having
a massive effect on storms and weather
That's only going to speed up.
Then you take technology,
you take artificial intelligence,
you take quantum computing,
you apply that to all the things
that we all build businesses around.
It means everything is going to move even faster
than it has over the last five years.
I'm not saying that to scare the hell out of you.
I don't get that emotional about this stuff.
I try to look at the world as clear as I can
through the inputs that I have
and then make smart determinations.
And that's what people have to do.
I think anyone who thinks we're going to snap back
and into an era of sane politics, effective governance,
a cooling climate, technology that slows, like come on.
Like none of those things were even possible.
All these things have been unleashed.
So then the question is, what do you do with that?
And I think it affects on how you build your culture?
How do you structure your company?
Where do you do business?
And I think they're fun things to figure out.
And like you could cower in fear because change scares you.
Or you could be like let's get it on.
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