The authors of Politico Playbook are leaving their longtime employer to launch a media company that will compete with the popular Capitol Hill newsletter, according to Axios.
Playbook authors Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, along with Politico’s Capitol Hill bureau chief John Bresnahan, will launch their own daily newsletter in 2021 as part of a stand alone company.
They’re the latest boldface Washington journalists to exit an established media organization in order to enter the world of stand-alone newsletters. Matthew Yglesias, formerly of Vox, and Andrew Sullivan, most recently of New York, have both launched newsletters on the Substack platform.
“The newsletter,” according to Axios, “will include a heavy focus on Capitol Hill reporting, given the expertise of the trio, but it’s not designed to be a carbon copy of Politico’s flagship newsletter Playbook.”
Nevertheless, the new venture means that Sherman and Palmer will be “competing against the Playbook franchise they helped create and grow.”
Read the full Axios story here.
Luke Mullins is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine focusing on the people and institutions that control the city’s levers of power. He has written about the Koch Brothers’ attempt to take over The Cato Institute, David Gregory’s ouster as moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, the collapse of Washington’s Metro system, and the conflict that split apart the founders of Politico.
