A confession: Not only do I read the New York Times, but I read Axios. Who?
Less than a year after Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei launched the media startup Axios with plans to upend the way news organizations deliver stories and advertising, the company is plotting a major expansion of its newsroom.
Its “bio” on twitter is more Axios-like: “Smart brevity worthy of people’s time, attention and trust.” Short blurbs of news with a sentence, maybe a paragraph, following about why it matters. It’s the Vox ‘splainer model with 1/100th the number of words murdered.
So what makes it special?
To fund the expansion, Axios has raised $20 million, according to Axios co-founder and President Roy Schwartz.
This comes after only ten months. And while it has yet to become a major player, it’s not doing badly at all in an online media industry that’s sucking financial wind.
On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that BuzzFeed and Vice Media are on track to miss their revenue targets for this year. Mashable, meanwhile, has agreed to sell itself to trade publisher Ziff Davis for $50 million, according to people familiar with the matter—a fraction of its $250 million valuation in March 2016.
Although the Axios audience is growing, it still lags behind some of its competitors in and around the nation’s capital. Axios attracted more than six million unique visitors in September, according to comScore. That same month, Politico drew more than 20 million unique visitors, the Washington Post topped 95 million, and Breitbart had more than 13 million.
For now, Axios is free and feeding off advertising. but its business model is to go high-end paywall.
When Axios made its debut in January, Mr. VandeHei said the company would introduce a high-end paywall, help fix what he called a “broken” media business, and create smart, short content and newsletters aimed at corporate executives and other professionals.
What makes Axios different? It pushes bite-size nuggets of news to readers via emails and social media. Its brevity suits the attention span of social media users. It’s prompt, occasionally breaking news, but a good curator. And it’s got that sentence to explain not only what the news is, but what it means. That’s the rub.
A while back, Axios co-founder Mike Allen wrote that media should worry less about competence and more about working with people you like. And while its political reporting is unabashedly liberal, its legal reporting runs the gamut from moderately clueless to dead wrong. In a good post, they’ll merely use the wrong word to describe the news. In a bad one, they will get it utterly wrong. At best, it’s insufferably shallow:
The Department of Homeland Security used cell phone-tracking devices across the U.S. 1,885 times between 2013 and 2017, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed.
Why it matters: The technology has been criticized by the ACLU for invading the privacy of people in the area not under investigation, as it can collect data from their phones as well, BuzzFeed reports.
You didn’t expect to be a Stingray expert after reading this, but is that it? Might there even be a Fourth Amendment issue for the target, too? And this is one of their better posts. The writer is Haley Britsky, 2017 journalism grad from Texas Tech. There’s nothing wrong with using young, inexperienced kids to write your blurbs. But the value of a ‘splainer is no better than the knowledge of the person doing the ‘splainin’.
Not long after I discovered Axios, I urged them to do something. I’ve urged them again on the twitters.* Much as they might like cool, hip, progressive kids (who will likely work on the cheap), they need a legal editor. A lawyer. An experienced lawyer. An experienced lawyer with journalism experience, but a lawyer. Where does Haley Britsky come off explaining why cell-site simulators matter?
I had one overarching rule that applied to Fault Lines: don’t make people stupider. I get it that Axios is hot takes and small blurbs by young writers. I get it that Axios has a culture of cool rather than competence. I get it. And for the most part, they can be forgiven their common problems, like using the wrong words to describe legal stuff. Hell, long-form non-lawyer writers aren’t a whole lot better, for the most part.
But if Axios wants to be what it hopes to be, a primary curator of quick news with an even quicker ‘splainer, then it has to make the effort to be accurate. Otherwise, it’s making people stupider, even if Haley Britsky is doing her super-best. And if it hopes to execute on its business plan by going paywall, then it needs to put some serious thought into whether anyone wants to pay to be misinformed.
Now that they’ve got an additional $20 million to play with, it’s time for the Axios kids to take their responsibility seriously and vet their content for accuracy. While it’s totally understandable that Mike Allen won’t like hanging out with lawyers, and everybody fears that lawyers will be verbose, risk-averse, plodding and just generally not the kind of people anyone wants to hang around with, you still need to not make people stupider about law. At least if you want to become a real player, and want people to pay for your content.
Now that you’ve got the funding, you’ve got no excuse for pushing out legally clueless crap. Get a legal editor, Axios. Just do it. I’m rooting for Axios to succeed, and your short form plus ‘splainer is a great idea for a world with far too much news happening far too fast to keep pace. But if you can’t be trusted to get it right, and in fact occasionally get it dead wrong, then you’re just making people stupider. Please don’t make people stupider.
*On a couple occasions, when I twitted something back at them that they got badly wrong, I would get a response asking if they could call me to discuss what they got wrong. Of course, I would reply. I never heard from them. Not once. Shiny squirrel?
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I like Axios. Seems that its business model, judging from its masthead, involves hiring young ‘uns for the straight news hits, and tried-and-true veterans for the more specialized content.
Why discussion of the Fourth Amendment falls to the former group is beyond me.
If I didn’t think Axios was a worthwhile concept, it wouldn’t be worthy of my attention. You don’t see me writing about Breitbart. And I suspect you’ve seen my occasional twits poking Axios for some particularly bad post, headline or graphic, which is just my way of urging them to think harder. And even more to the point, you know (while others here may not) that I’m very supportive of young writers.
But they have to get it right. Just because they’re young and cool does not mean they get a pass on accuracy. If they want to vastly improve the quality of their accuracy, they need to care a whole lot more about competency. Law is “specialized content.” Law is not whatever crap pops into some kid’s head.
And if anyone at Axios is reading this, Cristian is exactly the sort of writer you should beg to come work for you. Not only does he know what he’s talking about, but you would want to hang out with him as well.
I appreciate the recommendation, but I was really hoping you’d say something about my looks and how that’s an asset to any newsroom. It’s not all about talent all the time, you know.
Oh please, one look at your abs and they’ll drool.
I’ve seen their “tried and true” guys on twitter. They want to make a name for themselves a political pundits of the liberal persuasion, spouting the mundane hot takes on cable news and pounding the shit out of it to let everybody know how they’re always available should Morning Joe call. They don’t seem to give a damn about substance, as long as they can get some Brit on TV.
I’ve made the occasional comment about their constantly puffing themselves. I get that they’re a start-up and need to grow their audience, but it’s a shame they have so little faith in their content that they constantly need to have one Axios guy praising the shit out of another Axios guy, as if no one not on the payroll has anything good to say about them. It’s not a good look.