How Axios tries to create truly differentiated content

It focused on delivering bit-sized scoops that are easy to digest.

There are few people as knowledgeable about web publishing as Scott Rosenberg. In 1995, he and a group of other San Francisco Examiner journalists launched Salon.com, one of the first online magazines. An early blogger, he wrote the definitive history of the blogosphere and published it as a book in 2009. Today, Rosenberg is the tech editor for Axios, a website launched in 2017 by Politico founders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei.

Since its debut, Axios has tried to upend the paradigm for how news can be delivered. Instead of adhering to the structure of the traditional news article, Axios reporters strive for succinctness by delivering information in a bulleted, just-the-facts-ma’am form. As co-founder Jim VandeHei explained in a 2017 interview, “Ninety percent of stories either shouldn’t have been written or should have been 10 percent the length. Most people do not want to spend five minutes on 1500 words of mediocrity on something that has one interesting fact, figure or quote.”

In my interview with Scott Rosenberg, he told me about Salon’s first viral story and explained why the online magazine was way ahead of its time, in both the way it delivered news and how it monetized content. We also discussed Axios’s approach to news gathering and whether its “Be smart” tagline is patronizing or enlightening.

To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player, or you can play the YouTube video below. If you scroll down you’ll also find some transcribed highlights from the interview.

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This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Why Salon was ahead of its time

Salon, when it launched in 1995, called itself an online magazine and was published on a weekly schedule. “Almost immediately, we realized, ‘Oh, this is crazy,’” recalled Rosenberg. “‘Our traffic is huge on the day we post things and then it drops to nothing. We need to be publishing new stuff every day.’” Within a year, the site was publishing daily content, but it took about four years before the site did away with ‘issues’ entirely. 

Salon’s first really viral story came when it reported on the extramarital affair of Henry Hyde, a House member who had been sharply critical of Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. “At that point we were getting daily traffic reports, so there were no realtime metrics. Chartbeat didn't exist. The main vector back then was Drudge. Drudge picked it up and then the flood gates opened and of course all the TV stations could then go in and say, ‘well, we didn't report this, but this shady website called Salon published it and we're just reporting what they published, that Henry Hyde has this problem in his past. So it went straight from the web to TV without the intermediate step that we have today of Twitter and Facebook.”

In terms of monetization, Salon pioneered many of the business models that are now commonplace in web publishing: subscriptions, online ads, memberships, and even affiliate advertising. “Eventually the thing that actually was most successful for us was the membership program. During the Iraq War run up, we were one of the few media outlets that were pretty clearly opposed to the Iraq War from the beginning. If you recall that era, it was a time when a lot of the media was very heavily in favor of the war. And we found that, at the peak, I think we had 80,000 subscribers who were essentially paying because they just wanted to support our journalism. We actually started breaking even around 2004, 2005.”

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How Axios differentiates itself from other news outlets

When Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei launched Axios, they made it clear that it wouldn’t just be another newspaper in digital form. It would appeal to an educated, busy news consumer who didn’t want to waste their time reading through a thousand words of information they already knew just to get to the real story. “It’s very oriented towards mobile consumption and figuring out how you can deliver trustworthy, smart coverage in a way that doesn't oversimplify the news,” said Rosenberg.

One issue I brought up with Rosenberg is that Axios’s coverage sometimes came off as patronizing with its “be smart” messaging that assumes that the core lessons of the story need to be spoon fed to the reader. “Certainly we don't ever want people to feel patronized to,” he replied. “And if that's happening we're obviously doing something wrong. From the very beginning at Axios, the ambition that Jim and Mike had was to cast a much wider net, to reach many more people. So the question for us every day is defining what is it that people really know about this subject. When it comes to tech coverage in particular, what we're doing at Axios is kind of connecting people who are in the industry out here on the West Coast and people in DC policy circles, and try to explain those two worlds to each other essentially. So sometimes we'll put in an explanation of something in the tech world that everybody in the tech world knows, but then a lot of people in DC won’t know it, and vice versa. We'll have to explain some intricacy of the way the FCC works that a lot of people in DC know already, but that nobody in Silicon Valley really knows. So we're doing a bit of a dance. Sometimes we miscalculate. I would prefer as an editor and as a journalist to miscalculate on the side of over explaining things, because I think too often journalists are still writing for one another and we're always sort of assuming that people know things that they really don't know. So I'd rather err on the side of overexplaining.” 

Whatever happened to that $10,000 price tag?

When Axios launched, its founders regularly boasted that the publication would eventually roll out a subscription product that would cost $10,000 annually and be aimed at industry leaders. But the subscription product never materialized. Did this mean that Axios found a better model that involved pairing free content with ads? “You know, I can't even tell you because I've never heard of a $10,000 a year product,” said Rosenberg. “If there's one being cooked up -- it could be happening -- but I don't know anything about it.”

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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.

Image via HBO