Inside Politico’s franchise playbook for Playbook

[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey. This week, I'm speaking to Kate Day, the executive editor for Europe at Politico. Kate and I discuss how Politico's Playbook franchise is going global.

It's now in five countries, and adding Spain and Australia this year. And it's also expanding well beyond a newsletter with audio, video, and what else? Events. Publishers are, it's safe to say, events crazy.

Getting the right people in the room, or in Politico's case, the pub, is critical, especially if you have a high-value audience like Politico's political power players and those who wanna influence them. As a side note, the Rebooting has several events of its own coming up. We will be doing a series of live podcast recordings at the Cannes Lions Festival next month. Uh, we will be also doing a media leaders dinner there, and also a Riviera version of our famed Media Mixer series.

Maybe it's not famed, but it will be famed. As Kate and I discuss, every publication needs a party product. I will be sharing more information on these activations in the coming weeks in case you are in Cannes, and I hope you will be, and, uh, we can hang out in the Riviera. If you're interested in discussing partnerships on, on these events and more, be sure to get in touch.

My email is brian@therebooting.com. And before we get to this conversation with Kate, a quick word from the Rebooting show's presenting sponsor, Beehiiv. When you are running a media business, email is usually the backbone, as discussed in my talk with Kate coming up.

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If you are running a publication with more than 100,000 subscribers, Beehiiv is built for you. Their team has scaled newsletters at places like the Information Puck, and as I said, Morning Brew, so they understand the challenges that you face. From seamless migration to enterprise-grade deliverability and monetization, Beehiiv makes it easy to grow, retain, and engage audiences at serious scale. If you wanna see what your next stage of growth could look like, go to beehiiv.

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Now, onto my conversation with Kate. [upbeat music] Kate, thanks so much for joining me today. Pleasure to be here, and great to see you. Okay.

So let's talk about... I wanna s- start a little bit about where you come from with, with your background, right? Because, you know, you... I feel like you've ha- had one foot in, in a couple different worlds.

You know, one obviously is as a journalist in, in the newsroom, and the other is more on the audience/product side. How does that kinda inform your thinking when it comes to making, making journalistic products now in 2026? Yeah, it's an interesting question, and you're right. I've crossed across that line, I guess, or, or at least blurred that line through most of my career, going right back to my very first job in journalism, which was as a local reporter.

Well, job is maybe an exaggeration. I was an intern for a paper in California, very traditional newspaper. I followed a boyfriend to California, which was disastrous, but I found myself working for a local paper there that was really very traditional. I was doing exactly the kind of local politics and schools reporting and town beat reporting that so many of us do at the beginning of our careers, but I was doing it in Los Altos, and I was surrounded in 2005 by all sorts of interesting digital figures.

I knew very little then about digital media, but I was instantly captivated. So I came back to London to go to journalism school, intent on being a journalist, but already very interested in how digital media was changing the profession. And when I left journalism school, I really wanted to work at a company that was focused on the future and on digital, and I was very interested in working with colleagues in the product tech data end of, of newspapers. So I joined The Telegraph, which in those days, under Will Lewis, in fact, who is now back in the headlines for different reasons, but in those days was editor-in-chief at The Telegraph and was expanding a digital team.

So my starting point in journalism, somewhat accidentally, was always on that intersection, sitting in a newsroom, but really looking towards tech and product and digital audiences. And I got, as you said, very, very interested in, in audiences and how we were understanding what they wanted from media companies as the internet opened up different ways of reaching people, engaging people. And so my career at The Telegraph over many years took twists and turns, but really sat on that intersection for much of the time.

I ended up running digital coverage, but always from a pretty audience-focused perspective, and I found that mix very, very useful. Then joining Politico, of course, completely different challenge. At Politico in 2015, we'd just launched in Brussels. The question was really, will this model that's worked so well in DC translate to Europe?

But those skills, understanding what audiences might need from us and trying to adapt what we did to be responsive to audiences have, has certainly stood me in good stead.I would say Yeah. So let's talk about Playbook, right? Because I think of, I think of that as, like, the core of Politico.

I know Politico does a lot of things, right? But, like, it's, shockingly, Playbook is gonna be 20 years old next year. Like, and Politico got- Doesn't that make you feel old? [laughs] Extremely, honestly.

And, you know, at the time, you know, email was underappreciated, I think particularly i- by consumer publications. If you think about the time that people... It was, it was about search and, and then it, it went, went into social after that. But email was mostly, it was, it was appreciated by B2B publishers, honestly, way more.

It's, it's funny now that, like, you know, people have gotten, like, email fever, because the, like, in B2B it was always... And I, I feel like Politico and these kind of, they're like a, almost like a form to me of, like, B2B publications, right? Because the, the business is influencing government at the end of the day. It's just a different form of B2B.

There, there's some differences, right? But anyway, it, it's been, like, 20 years, and when you joined in Europe, it was about, like as you said, expanding into there, and, and Playbook obviously, you know, started in, originally in Brussels, and now it's expanded to London, and you're going into Madrid, and I believe Canberra. Canberra, yeah. What's the capital?

Canberra Playbook- Canberra... comes in August. Yeah. [laughs] I don't talk about the capital of Australia a lot.

I was just gonna try to slur that. [laughs] Yeah. It's a word I read, but I don't say. I- Yeah...

to, yeah, my Australian listeners, I'm sorry. So tell me about, like, tra... When you talked about translating Playbook, 'cause Playbook was a, the original sort of agenda-setting newsletter. It didn't have, like, a million competitors like it do- like it does today.

Talk about translating that into l- a European context. Yeah, I think it comes back again to what are you trying to do for that audience? And the idea of Playbook right back in 2007 and the idea we took to Brussels in 2015 was if you could narrate what is coming up in the day ahead in a way that was really useful for people, that felt more like a smart letter or conversation with a very good friend, your best informed friend [laughs] on politics, told you things you didn't know, but also summarized everything that is known and has been reported about the day coming up.

That recipe, that mix of a service for a readership that has a professional stake in politics, that kind of B2B origin, as you correctly describe, combined with original reporting that you can't read somewhere else, hopefully makes Playbook useful, and if it can do that in a fun, digestible way that you actually wanna read at 7:00 in the morning, then you're onto something. And we took that recipe to Brussels first and foremost, and then in 2017 to London, and now in multiple European capitals, and really it's worked very well.

I think there was a concern a bit in Brussels when we first launched, do people need news at this kind of frenetic daily pace? Is that just a weird American thing, or is there enough going on here? Are the characters interesting enough? Is Brussels just- Are they?...

full of bureau- bureaucrats? I think they are, absolutely are, because in every political bubble it's about the people, and if you're working- Yeah, yeah... in that bubble, part of doing that effectively is understanding the, the people dynamics as much as it is knowing policy topics and, you know, what's on the agenda for the day. So that mixture of taking the policy and politics seriously, but having a bit of fun with the characters and taking people behind the scenes of how decisions are really made, that, that's worked in every market we've tried it in, and really in much the same way every place.

I'm just back from a week in Spain talking to candidates who want to do this for us in Spain, and it's amazing how the dynamic and as they play back to me what they think Playbook could do in Madrid, it, it's really exactly the same recipe seems to resonate, so it's, uh, striking. So does the Playbook need to be tweaked at all based on, or is this something that can be... I mean, usually y- y- you have slightly different ver... I mean, everyone wants a playbook, like, literally, I'm talking about playbook, what's playbook.

You, you wanna have, like, a playbook that you can, you know, basically do in different areas, but you end up, you, you end up having to customize it. What, what, what is the sort of differentiation? 'Cause you, it's not like you were coming from the, the, the DC mothership to, like, you know, stamp, stamp out the ver... That was the old version, I think.

Tell me about how, like, what are the changes? What, what are, what are the differences that you have to take into account for the different markets? Yeah, it's a great question, and we have experimented, I would say, over 10 years and, and debated a lot how much should be localized, how much should be standardized. I think that essential recipe, does this product feel like a letter from a friend?

Does it look ahead into the day that's coming up? Does it include everything that's going on in politics, plus some exclusive reporting we can add? That recipe stands very strong and very consistent in every market. Of course, the tone of how a friend might pitch that letter or what people find funny in different markets or how you talk about political dynamics and characters, that is quite unique to each place, just as each collection of human beings tends to adopt its own cultural reference points.

And so the tone of the Playbook in different places is somewhat different, or at least adjusted a little bit for the local market. But we also enjoy being insiders who have a foot outside that bubble, too. So sometimes looking at British politicsAs somebody or a team of people who know British politics very well, but do so through a slightly outsider lens from time to time, can pull in reporting from elsewhere in the world, have a perspective that is slightly more global, use American spelling, that, that tends to- Wow...

get quite a reaction- That's very controversial... in London. Some people hate that. I've spent a lot of time- Some people love that [laughs]...

I've spent a lot of time over the spelling issue at Digiday when, you know, we had a team in London. I, I was like- Yeah... "Look, this is not personal, we just need to standardize, and, and r- you're just gonna have to use the Z," cent. Yeah.

Whatever. Yeah. Uh- So we, we have those debates too, and now as we go into markets like Paris, or Berlin, or Madrid, we're writing in local languages, and so then, of course, the tone is really quite different. The journalistic heritage or even existing in in those markets is quite different.

But we try to set teams off in fundamentally the same direction as we do in Washington with Playbook in Brussels, in London. So I would say that the recipe, if you like, is the same in each place, but the tone, and the framing, and the sections of the newsletter, lots of that adapts to the local context, because it only works if it really connects with the people reading it, and the, not just a, a wide group of people reading it, but really the few hundred people making the decision in each place.

That what makes these products really strong, and you have to read to them like something that is indispensable, urgent, valuable, and narrates their day in a way that feels reflective of how their day is actually going to be. And so if you don't get that adaptation to each market, it, it just feels- Yeah... a little disconnected with the audience. Well, yeah, and you also, you don't want it to feel like an American franchise, like in Europe, I mean, particularly these days.

Yeah. Yeah [laughs] We're not that popular worldwide. Yeah. I don't know if you've noticed.

And just because you're gonna have, you're gonna have local competitors, right? I mean, the, the, the, the success of Capital P Playbook is, is well known, and so y- you're g- you're gonna have people who are running very similar things. So you're in, I, I believe, five countries now, and you're, you're going into Madrid, or to Spain and Australia. So I think it's UK, Belgium, Germany, France, US.

Am I missing one? Yes, that's right. And then we- and Canada Canada. And then we're going into, into Madrid and into Canberra in Australia.

Okay. So how do you... 'Cause I mean, Politico now is fully owned by Axel Springer, and it seems very clear that, that the, the company is shifting to be more of an integrated global company. You know, when it expanded to Europe, it was, it was, it was different.

It was, it was not owned by Axel Springer. It was, as I said, there was that the, the, the joint venture really that, that launched in Brussels. How does that change? Because you're not, it's not fully in...

Like, you do the Europe side, but, like, the US side is separate, right? Yeah, so our history made it really quite separate, because we w- had this different ownership structure in North America and in Europe. We ran as two very separate teams up until the point where Axel Springer bought all of it, and at that point, we have gradually integrated much more. So I now speak daily to counterparts in North America and to our global editor in chief, Jonathan Greenberger.

Those kind of relationships are unimaginable really when we launched 10 years ago in Europe, because we were a totally standalone publication in Brussels. I think to some degree that was very helpful at the beginning, because it meant we could be fully responsive to the local audience in Brussels. We weren't trying to align with what had worked in Washington. And so in many ways, I think that was, it was a product of a, of a corporate structure, but it was very helpful for the team in Europe.

We could just be responsive to what was working here, and by the time we're now looking more globally to connect things up, we've already got a very strong organization across Europe. So we're coming at it from a, from a different place. Had we been an offshoot then of North America, it might have been, I would argue, a, a tougher challenge to connect locally this side of the Atlantic. So we've had two CMSes and we've had two separate sales teams and so on, and gradually the sales team's now one globally.

Editorially, we're reporting into one structure, much more alignment across markets, and very soon we will have all the same tech too. So definitely you're right in that direction- Yeah... of travel. I also think as you grow past a publication in a local village, if you like, Washington and then Brussels, and you start to build out Politico globally, one of the things you realize is the value is in connecting up between those locations, and that is very hard to do if each location is running too separately.

So I think partly this is a product of being owned by, by Axel Springer now for all of Politico. I think it's also an evolution of a publication that started as one village, became a collection of villages, and now very much the value we see for readers is being able to connect up across those villages. The number of people in Spain who understand us nearly 20 years into the publication and 10 years after we launched in Europe, as I talk to people there, they understand us as a route to connect Spain to the rest of Europe, a route to get insight from Washington.

That's a very different landscape to when we launched 10 years ago in Brussels, and really there the Brussels audience was just interested in what we could report in Brussels. So it feels like global politics has shifted somewhat into a more interconnected direction, but also just the natural evolution of growing up as a publication. You start to see real value in being able to connect between teams, which of course is its own challenge and a new thing for us to figure out how to do.

And yeah.Yeah. Do you feel it's an American brand or, like, an international brand that happens to have a large presence in Washington, DC? I think emphatically a international brand, but it is interesting how differently that is viewed in different markets.

One of the great privileges- Yeah... of my job now is I bounce around between different markets. I oversee teams across Europe, but I spend a lot of time in DC too. And when you ask people in Spain, for example, "What do you know about Politico?

What do you think of Politico?" They mostly talk about Brussels and our connection to Europe. They know us as having strong coverage of Europe, and then some of them will know that we had an American history too. Whereas when we launched in London in 2017, even though we'd been in Brussels for a couple of years at that point, even though Brexit was this huge story and we actually had a lot of Brits reading our coverage from Brussels, we were known as an American brand in London in those days, not unsurprisingly.

We'd existed in America for so much longer. But everybody I met would talk about The West Wing or House of Cards and, you know, their understanding of Politico was shaped by a British view of American politics. That really hasn't been the case this year as I've been doing very similar kinds of conversations in Madrid. So overall, Playbook has what, like, a one point...

How many subscribers, like 1.5 million? Yeah. And some more.

Yeah, that kind of- Okay... region, yeah. And, like, you know, the, the, the US version is, is the biggest. I, I'm interested in, you know, when it was started, you know, Mike Allen was, was the author, and obviously he and, and Jim VandeHei went on to, to start Axios, and then you got all kind...

Then, then Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer were, were doing it, and then they went to start Punchbowl. And I feel like Playbook as a franchise was always in that sweet spot that a lot of people are trying to figure out right now between the institution and the individual. Like, which is, which is more important, which is, you know, less, but you kinda, you kinda want both, right? This guy here who runs Politico, he talks about faces and franchises, and I think that's a good way of, of putting it.

How do you end up thinking about that? 'Cause you st- I've noticed that, like, Politico has started to call, you know, people, like, hosts. I think that's an interesting term as, as the, the journalism function changes to some degree. Yeah.

I mean, I think Playbook has always been a, a both kind of product. You want somebody- Yeah... who is, as I said before, narrating the day and also providing you with exclusive information. In, in many traditional models of journalism, that wouldn't have been one person, right?

That would've been two different people or two different teams, and we put them together in Mike originally, and then subsequently in Playbook everywhere. So I always think Playbook has done this combination of things, and in some ways it is more akin to hosting. We now have podcast versions of Playbook in most of the markets that we're in. We're going to launch Paris this summer in June, so that will be the next one.

We've recently launched in, in Brussels. We have a partnership, in fact, with Sky News in London that does a similar morning podcast looking into the day. And I think there is great synergy between podcast hosting and newsletter hosting. It's interesting to me that lots of podcasts have gone the other way and added newsletters.

We obviously had the newsletters, and we've kind of added the podcasts. Yeah. But I would see the role of the authors as convening this community as well as reporting on exclusive information. So it, it, it has always been a combination of both, I think, and as we've grown out what the product does, you mentioned on, on previous episodes of this show, every media needs a party, so added parties- Yeah...

added events. I think that does play up this role of hosting, if you like, or comparing playbooks that, that has grown beyond being a reporter feeding exclusive reporting into, into one product. We, we're, we're asking our, our Playbook authors to play several of those roles, really. Yeah.

But I think, you know, the, the question always with the individual, obviously with, with the rise of Sub Stack and, and Washington, DC alone is really remarkable as far as the decentralization of media goes. I mean, there are dozens of, like, newsletters, YouTube shows, podcasts, all from, like, individuals, in addition to all of the brands that the, the sort of spawn of Politico that [laughs] It's like a Russian nesting doll- Yeah [laughs]... with... And I...

Look, I lived in Washington in the late 19- like, late 1990s. It used to just be Roll Call and Politico. They were these little newspapers that were, like, supported by people who were renting out, like, English garden, AKA basement apartments, like, to legislative aides on the, on the Hill. It was a totally different business.

Washington itself was a, a sleepier place where the houses were a lot less expensive, and the size of the federal government has gotten massive, and so [laughs] Yeah... so too has the market. That's why I say it's B2B. It's a growth industry.

I mean, is that different in these other markets in that it isn't as decentralized? Because I feel like the U- the, the, the US media market might be a little bit more decentralized or have gone faster in this direction than, than European markets. Yeah, I think that's largely true, though with some exceptions. There are people across all our markets, I think, who have, you know, very much provided a, a one-person show, Sub Stack or podcast or something that's playing in this space too.

I think they have too taken inspiration from a, a direction of travel, probably, as you say, set in North America. I do think, though, that the fundamentals, you know, you contrast all the way back to somebody writing in their basement and this being a very different thing. I think it is in, in lots of ways, and certainlyJust in the, um, volume of information [laughs] that we're now all processing every day. But the fundamental impetus from an audience point of view, why do you read this kind of product?

Why do you enjoy this kind of thing in your inbox first thing in the morning? It's for that dual mixture of connection to a person and a bubble and the amount of information that's going to be useful for you during your day. Yeah. And Playbook promises both things.

Now, to be useful across all the areas of federal government we cover in North America, across all the EU member states and all the many ways we cover it, that takes a team and that takes filtering with many people, but you don't want to lose that connection with the letter from a friend idea. You don't want to lose that voice in your ear in the morning. And so, again, I think you need both, but you need just emphatically more of both at scale in a way that, you know, 10, 20 years ago was not feasible or even imagined.

That was all sort of still to come and, and done by one or two people. So yeah, I think it's got bigger in its expression, but the fundamental drivers of those Playbook products are still really very similar, I would say, to 20 years ago. Yeah. So from a product perspective, I mean, we're, as I said, like almost 20 years old, right?

Playbook was like a trailblazer when it came to, like understanding, you know, that newsletters are really powerful for a bunch of different reasons. It's habit, everyone reads email, you get a direct connection, you get i- interesting data about people that you don't get when oftentimes when they just land on a webpage, and so on and so forth. Right? But then building that into a franchise, I mean, from my view, political is a little bit late, like, in that, like, the, the, the Playbook was such a powerful brand within Politico, but it really has stayed mostly like a newsletter.

Now, you do have podcast versions and you're, you're doing more in events, maybe a party product. Party products are important. But tell me about, like, transitioning Playbook into a true franchise that is expressed in a bunch of different ways. Yeah, I mean, I think we've certainly focused in Europe on anticipating that audience need.

Fundamentally, how do you strengthen the connection between us and the audience and in, in that bubble, and how do you provide more useful information? So that has looked like multiple sends. Of course, DC Playbook has sent multiple times in the day and every day of the week for some time, but that's a relatively new thing for teams in Europe, and we're still adding to that. The podcast for sure.

As podcasts become more video products too, that absolutely means you change the, the visual presentation of Playbook and, as you say, live events. In each place, it's almost... And I've really, again, got a good glimpse of this focused on Madrid in the last few months. The market has moved such a long way, and we at Politico have moved such a long way that while a few years ago it might have taken us many years to go from newsletter to podcast, now we're talking about that really and as part of the same conversation because, of course- Right...

audiences are expecting it. So in, in London, we launched just with a morning newsletter, the podcast, the afternoon newsletter, the community around Playbook who showed up for events. That all came later. In Madrid, we're thinking about that much more holistically from the beginning.

The audience impetus, the reason you might want to get involved in those kind of ways, the reason we want to show up in different formats, that hasn't changed so much, but just because news habits have moved and because we have already figured out some of these questions in other markets, we can get to an answer quicker and end up launching across more, more platforms earlier than we would have done in, you know, in Brussels in 2015. Yeah. So what is the event strategy? Everyone needs an event strategy.

I wanna do an event strategy event, actually, just to completely... I mean, I already do media about media, so why not do an event about events? Yeah, you totally should do an event about events. [laughs] Sign me up.

I think it's a fascinating question. We do all kinds of events at Politico. For Playbook, we're really focused on doing these summits. We've, in the last few years you may have heard a bit about Politico Pubs.

These grew out of initially our partnership with CNN and The Grill at the conventions, and then we took the pub idea to the Munich Security Conference, and last year to British political party conferences. We literally built our own pub. I remember when our events team pitched this. The journalists were fairly skeptical that we would pull off building a pub, but we did.

And we put interesting politicians on stage, had them in the room for a drink, had them pulling pints, in fact. So it was this combination, a bit like Playbook itself, of news making interviews, but also connection of a community, a place where people- Yeah... could come and meet each other. But this is like at- And the Playbook summits- I'm sorry...

are the same- Y- yeah, but, but like-... same idea... this is, like, at, like, I guess in my industry, I would call it, like, tentpole events, but, like, Munich Security Conference, Davos, those kinds of, like, existing events that you are sort of attaching the brand to. That's where we started, yes, absolutely.

Right. And now we want to take that same concept, having a drink with Playbook, and do our own events- Yeah... branded Playbook. So that will be the next iteration of it, Playbook summits in each of the markets where we have a Playbook.

Okay, so the summit model, those are, like, more, like, owned events. Like, I think of... I do stuff at, like, like Possible or CAN and things like that, and those are... You already have the congregation of people there.

There's sponsor budgets that are already against these events, like, and so that's one model. But ultimately, you wanna, you wanna be running your, your own events usually within an event strategy. And people are doing, I don't know if you know this, people are doing a lot of events.People are doing a lot of events, yes...

Axios is doing over 200, and this is from, like, not, like, it wasn't like they were always, like, hyper-focused on events. I mean, they were just in Miami at, like, F1, and it was like, "See you in Monaco." I mean, it's like [laughs] this is, this is a different business these days. So tell me about, like, how you're thinking about the, the events model, particularly in the summits, 'cause there is a particular Washington, DC style of event.

It's the breakfast. They don't, like, exist in, like, New York. I, I don't know why. People drink here, I guess.

But like, it's always like, you know, a view from the top, which is the sponsored session, and then you get, like, a couple of, like, lawmakers or regulators or something, and I assume the audience is a lot of, like, lobbyists and people trying to influence government and whatnot. Is that, does that exist in other markets, or is this just a Washington, DC phenomena? It for sure exists in other markets. I would say different variations.

In fact, the breakfast model was much more there in, in Brussels when we launched, so we, we did quite a lot of policy round tables, meet subscribers, those kind of thing. When we came to London, in fact, we got strong pushback, feedback from the audience that coming for breakfast was not so fun in London, partly because commutes- Really?... are so long, and also because people wanted to drink. So we moved those to the afternoons, and we did a glass of wine- That's why you need-...

talking about Brexit policy... that's why you need a party. That's why you need a party product, I think. [laughs] Yeah, yeah.

So there were different flavors, but yes, in most of the markets we're in, some version of that exists. What I don't think exists quite, and what f- has felt so interesting about the pub model is literally doing it in a pub. On the face of it, you might say, how is that so different to any other one-on-one interview with a politician? I do think there's an informality in- Yeah...

having a drink with somebody, and you bring out a different kind of conversation, and you also create a space for politicians to meet each other, to be part of something that is a little unlike a panel with, you know- Right... a warm glass of white wine to be mean about the sort of stereotype of these sorts of things than if you're actually going to a pub and watching the football. We had Keir Starmer come and watch a football match in our pub at party conference. That feels very unlike the kind of way that a prime minister would show up at a panel event or show up and give a speech.

So we think that is closer, in a way, to, to what Playbook tries to do in, in written form, how the podcast tried to sound, and that's worked very well for us, hence the decision to take that pub model that has showed up at other people's events and start having that show up at, at our own, because, yeah, the response from an audience was very strong, and, and our, our journalists love doing it. So how will the... Then how are you thinking of, like, the summit? The idea is to recreate that feeling of coming and having a drink- Okay...

to do a series of conversations and then to have a party. So it starts with a, a more socially fun kind of configuration, but with space to talk about the big serious themes that, you know, drive politics- Yeah... everywhere. So it would be that same very familiar Playbook mixture of taking the politics and policy pretty seriously, providing people with newsworthy information, but doing it in quite a fun setting in a slightly- Yeah...

less formal way. Yeah. I think that's, that's... I just think it's funny 'cause the markets are al- are also very different.

I mean, I don't know Washington as well as New York, but, like, London has the advantage of having way better venues for everything. I don't know, you just have more better venues, different types of venues, whereas you get into New York, and it's all hotel ballrooms, and it, and you basically are... You can't create the events that you wanna create because you just are stuck with the, those terrible carpets and over air conditions, like hotel ballrooms, and they're just a not- Yeah, we do a good pub here in London.

That's definitely true. That's definitely true. And I do think, I mean, I, I remember having a moment at our party conference pub and thinking it really is true what they tell you in management conversations, that if you take somebody into a different context, you have a different conversation, and here we were doing, you know, discussions with politicians on stage. They'd just pulled a pint, and then they sit down with a reporter.

They have a very different kind of interview in a really good way, and, and we loved that, and it w- it was noticeably distinct getting the context, the venue, the setting right. In, in that case, we had to build our own in London. I don't think we'd need to build our own pub. There are plenty here, but- I think you've got enough...

we can certainly lean into that. And, and again, to your earlier point about how different they are in each place, a London pub wouldn't feel right to an audience in Madrid or quite right to an audience in Brussels, though they do enjoy an Irish pub in Bluh- Brussels, so maybe we should try that. But, you know, the, the venue, the, the format, exactly what feels right in each market, I suspect, is, is a little distinct in each market, but that enables you to then c- produce something that feels very authentically of the, the bubble that you are discussing and, and feels right for the people in the room.

Yeah. How are you thinking about podcast? I mean, when we talk about podcasts now, although we don't do video for this one, like, people are... A lot of times they're going straight to, to YouTube here.

People are obsessed with streaming and whatnot. How are... What opportunities do you see there as far as expanding the, the Playbook franchise? Yeah.

I certainly see reaching into video in a much more serious way, both for, you know, social video initially and then streaming, as you say. That feels like something where we're beginning to see success. It's fairly early days for us, but we're starting to experiment in a very positive way. I do just think also when you have a visual expression of a conversation, that somehow often travels further and creates more impact, and, and that is something we see, too.

So there's one thing hearing people talk and somehow, particularly if you're doing an interview with somebody whose face is very recognizable, that is instantly attractive to an audience or kind of resonates more broadly if you can have a, a video representation of that, of that interview. So it's certainly something- Yeah... that's very interesting to us, and we're, we're gradually experimenting more, I would say.But no like show concept.

Like, I mean, I know there's like, there's the... Like Axios is trying to, yeah, they've sort of had fits and starts with their, their video strategy. They did the thing with HBO that, that didn't totally work, and, and now they've got the Axios show. It's more of a YouTube thing.

I'm just wondering, like, how are you, how do you end up thinking about that? So we really broadly at this point have a couple of different types of podcasts. The Playbook ones are very focused, at least most of the week, on looking into the day. Monday to Thursday- Yeah...

the Playbook podcast comes out in the morning, helps you narrate the day in a very similar way to a Playbook newsletter. We are finding that in every market, Friday tends to be a little bit of a different pace for elected politicians, and they tend to organize their day differently. In Brussels, they often go back to their home countries. In parliamentary systems, it's not quite the same, but they work at a slightly different pace on a Friday.

So we are doing more of the show model, I guess, into the Friday episodes of those shows. People want something slightly longer and slightly more of a, you know, conversation with one or two people rather than a very tight, useful look ahead into the day. And we have shows like Dasha Burns Conversation, where she sits down with interesting people through the week, or Jonathan Martin's similarly launched a show. So I think there's space for both, but they tend to be at, for us, at each end of that spectrum.

Either very quick, useful, catch me up on today or something a little bit more considered and, you know, longer term that, that people also enjoy. Yeah. But, but really at each end rather than mixing the two. Yeah.

I, I mean, I, I ask this question often even though I send a lot of, like, email newsletters. I wonder whether there's just too many. Are you seeing any sort of wall being hit as far as engagement now? Like, it depends on the market obviously, and I think the most protected is, is when you're, when, when people need the information to do their jobs.

I think there was definitely some kind of newsletter bubble around, like, individuals with, with Substack and whatnot. I don't think they're growing as fast as they used to be. But what are you seeing as far as... Look, newsletters to me is, like, the best base to have, like, but, like, are, are you seeing that that is, you know, reaching saturation point?

I would say not within each arena. There's, there's a clear audience demand for the newsletter, the playbooks in each market, for example, and those playbooks are still growing in each market. The engagement levels are still really high. I think it comes back to your point about the urgency of needing information to do your job.

That is an amazingly strong pull for people still wanting to read a newsletter, and we also hear from a lot of readers everywhere. Again, it's one of the strikingly similar things about all the markets that we're in. There is a real value to them in knowing that all of their peers in that market have read the same thing in the morning. So that sort of agenda-setting part of newsletters which need for that to work, for everybody to have read the same newsletter, that is still very strong in each market.

Where we definitely see a slightly different picture is for people who work across multiple markets. At some point, there's a limit to how many newsletters any one person can read, and if you sit across a team covering many geographies or many policy areas, you can't possibly read everything Politico puts out that could be relevant. There is a challenge there in how do you engage that audience when they're really looking across geographies, and that's back to the thinking about the difference between building strong villages in each place and how do you start to connect up between the two.

Tech coverage is a great example, right? There's a huge amount of coverage coming out of teams for us in California and Washington, in Paris, in Brussels, in Berlin, in London, and so on. There are oftentimes similarities between the storylines, how governments respond to AI, how Mythos has accelerated, disrupted that conversation between regulators and, and tech companies. That's really interesting in lots of arenas, but trying to surface or trying to expect one reader to read every newsletter from each place we have a tech team is clearly just an unreasonable ask on our, our part and not a very compelling way for, for some people who work across markets to consume information.

So I think it would be additive keeping this strong connection in each place, but also finding ways to be more personalized, more tailored, fit together the different threads that some of our audience want as well, and getting that balance right is a really interesting question. I don't think that means you then swing away from newsletters into something else, but I think we are seeing a demand to personalize more, tailor that information because of this pressure of how many people can really read five, 10, 15 newsletters.

There's just a limit at some point. Yeah. How do you think about the markets? I mean, is it just the, the b- the biggest, the biggest markets?

I mean, I guess you're, you're just sort of ticking them, them, them off at this point, or do you... Is the goal to have one in each place? I mean, look, Politico, there was history. I mean, I remember when they bought, like, Capital New York, right?

They were gonna be in, like, every single state capital and whatnot. I'm wondering if that experience at all, like, informs, like, you know, maybe you don't have, you know, a play- Playbook Netherlands. Yeah, I think at some point you probably decide you don't need every one of the 27 countries. I do think one of the, one of the interesting things about Spain is both the local politics is fascinating.

There's a, there's a lot to write. There's a real gap, we think, in the way that Spanish politics is covered. Tends to be very partisan, very much a divided media market, and n- and nobody really doing this kind of reporting for insiders on politics in the way we would do it, so there seemed like a, a genuine gap there that we could fill well. But also the Spanish position on all sorts of questions politicallySanchez's response, the Prime Minister's response to Trump has been very interesting.

What Spain does on defense is pretty relevant for the rest of Europe, how Spain transitions to net zero and thinks about that kind of transition through its policy, that's also really relevant in all sorts of ways. I was hearing from people in Spain, government officials, they were off to California for Mediterranean climate countries conversations about energy and about how you regulate energy. Those kind of parallels for us are interesting, too. So I think it's partly looking, is the space in a market for a local playbook, for a local Politico, but also is that market interesting and enriching to some of these storylines like tech and energy that run across the world and we wanna be strong in multiple places.

And so really we're trying to do both things in Spain, grow a local bubble very tuned into a playbook, but also have Spanish coverage show up much more in English in our Brussels coverage, our Pan European coverage in Washington. Yeah. So really the choice of market is informed by looking down both of those lenses rather than simply saying the next biggest country is X, Y, or Z. Right.

And, and so you're, you're, you're also going into Australia. How are you thinking about beyond Euro- I love Europe, right? Don't get me wrong. I love visiting.

I was just there like a week ago. However, there, there are pro... I, I'm gonna sound very American. There are slightly more dynamic areas of the world.

Like, you know, how are you thinking about those markets and whether the play- whether the playbook franchise can make sense in, I don't know, like a lot of people are going to the Middle East, for example. Yeah. I mean, I think ultimately we would love Politico to be everywhere, or at least everywhere there's democracy. I think it's pretty tough for this kind [laughs] of journalism and this kind of publishing model to work if there isn't democracy, but everywhere there's a democracy we would love to be.

Australia's interesting for many reasons. Of course, it's English speaking and in many ways quite connected, particularly some of those policy lines I was just talking about, defense, energy, tech. A lot of politicians in Europe, in North America, look to Australia for some of those questions and vice versa as they're making policy choices. So it feels like a good extension of the markets we're already in, but it's also a chance to be in a third continent to start thinking about how do we then expand into Asia.

So I think, yes, ultimately we would love to be everywhere, but we also want to do it in a way that makes most sense and where we can really bring some value. And of course, because we at this point have so much reporting coming out of Europe, coming out of North America, we want to use that as we expand globally rather than just plant a flag in a new place and start from scratch again. Yeah. I need to ask the AI question.

Like, what, how... Are there any ways in which you are using AI within your organization that has made a significant impact on your work? Like, not just- Yes... you personally using Claude or any of that stuff like this.

I'm just like, I'm, we're, I'm doing this AI strategies event on, like, Wednesday where we're having, like, literally what is working. And I'm like, "I want you to spell out exactly what you are doing, what the results have been." And like, because a lot of times people go into very, like, vague generalities. I'm like, "Wait, so you're using Claude?

Okay, that's fine." I, you know, and, and, or it's, "We're not using it for reporting." I'm like, "Okay, obviously," or maybe not obviously, but that's good. How...

Is AI proving to be a, beneficial in, in how you, in how Politico does its work? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think I start from a position, how can this, how will this change how audiences interact with us? How can this accelerate what we're already doing?

So to give you some examples, there's all sorts of parts of reporting where I think AI can be very useful. That doesn't mean you have AI writing a story, but it does mean you have AI helping you filter data sets or keeping track of people moving job or something. There are ways of building tools like that that have proved very, very useful. They're typically most useful if the need comes from the reporting teams themselves, and I think that's where the reporting teams have found it most valuable but also most fun.

We would love to keep track of this data set or this kind of information. At the moment, we have a human being going to check a webpage every few days, or we set ourselves a reminder to do it. Is there a tool our newsroom engineering team can build to help them do that much faster and much more effectively? And oftentimes the answer's yes, and then oftentimes, too, how that tool helps one team is actually applicable in all sorts of parts of, of the organization.

So I think that kind of how we think about the process of reporting and using tools, we're, we're pretty excited about, and we've seen some, some good examples, of course, with a responsible approach to checking what then comes out. Translation would be another example. As we exist now in multiple languages, you have teams operating first and foremost in French or first and foremost in German. All of those teams are remarkably good linguists, definitely to my ear as a, as a Brit who is shamefully bad at, at languages, but it still takes them quite a lot of time to take a blurb written for a tech newsletter in Paris and make that usable for an English language team somewhere else.

AI can do an okay job of helping speed that up, but it doesn't produce something that we would be happy to publish, so we have quite strict standards rules about-Making sure that something is really safe for publication. But within that framework, AI can be a huge accelerant because otherwise stitching together teams in each geography- Yeah... operating locally would be much, much harder and, and more complicated, and, and actually just slower. Yeah.

But if you put on, like, sort of your product hat, I always hate that saying. Mm-hmm. But like, if, if, if you like sort of, you know, tap into that and you start to think about, you know, Playbook started, again, almost 20 years ago. I love email.

I send a lot of emails. W- w- they're talking about agentic future and all of this like, you know, kinda crazy sci-fi type stuff, and I'm sure like everything, it, it won't totally come, come to roost, but like some version of it will eventually. How do you end up thinking... 'Cause I think one of the challenges for a lot of publishers now is, is I almost feel like a paralysis of what kind of products they do build, right?

Like, how... What is the product that is going to be a sort of future-proof journalistic product in five years? I feel like that, as ever, is a very hard question to answer, but if you flip it round and think about it almost the other way, how would we need to set up our journalism such that when we know what we want to build on top or when audiences start to respond to tests we're running, we are then in a position to build fast. And there, I think not unlike SEO.

SEO came into newsrooms when I was first in journalism, sort of imposed from the outside, that you're writing all this work, and now we'll try and sort of retrofit it to a structure that Google has decided signals to that search engine what is the most important thing and why. And gradually, newsrooms got better at reverse engineering- Yeah... that. So we're writing such that Google...

And of course, some people took that to an extreme and write to try and sort of game the search results, and other people applied the lessons quite sensibly and sort of structured their stories such that they would show up higher in search results. And but newsrooms gradually figured that out. If you think about that exercise for AI, once AI- once you're going to an agent and asking a question about news coverage or asking for an update on something, what does the AI need to be able to do?

It really needs to be able to understand in much more detail what it is looking at when it's looking at an article. Most of us still structure news as whole articles. Gradually, our assumption is that will break down so that paragraphs or facts or nuggets of- Yeah... news within an article become the most valuable thing, right?

So what do you need to do to be ready for five years' time? Maybe you can't say this looks like X chatbot or this product, but I think you can say now you can think about how you structure the journalism, how you get newsrooms ready to produce feeds of coverage that then when my end user who's tired of reading 15 newsletters from Politico because they're trying to operate across many different geographies and many different policy areas, we can give them something really tailored for them if we've got the structure of the information in our systems right for them.

And I think that throws up all kinds of really interesting possibilities that set you up for a future where you can- Yeah... be much more responsive to agentic workflows or, you know, some of the possibilities of AI. And I think that is really exciting because you're solving for that problem where are we currently unable... kind of newsletter reader is not getting everything they need from us, is the ones who are looking across too many newsletters.

We can probably solve that through AI really quite quickly. I wonder what the role, how the jour- the journalist's job changes, right? 'Cause I think a lot of times people will say, "Well, it's the same." It's like, hmm, maybe, but I don't know if that's actually the case, right?

Like, I mean, I know you have to uncover unique information, non-public information, you know, is gonna be more valuable, right? Like, a- aggregating other information will be less valuable. Machines will, will do that increasingly. But I think also just exposing more of the information.

I think a lot of times journalists are creating, you know, basically you recreate a product every day, which is why it's a terrible business in many cases. [laughs] But, like, you're recreating a different product every single day, and you're saying, "Here's the product," whether it's a newsletter or something else. And to me it... I can see, you know, journalistic organizations basically becoming, you know, API companies and saying, "Okay, we're gonna sell an API to our corpus of information, and it's not necessarily a media artifact that we've created.

It... Not just that. It's, it's all kinds of information that went into the creation of that artifact," if that makes sense. Yeah.

It d- it totally makes sense as a sort of philosophical direction for our industry. I guess I would question, though, a little bit within that how many journalist roles themselves are changing. I think your point that uncovering exclusive information becomes more important if your hypothesis is right and we end up sending feeds of coverage, essentially APIs, to, to readers in some form. For a lot of the reporting effort at the end, that gets exponentially more important in that- Right...

world, and that's certainly one of the, the ways we think about it. Where can we free journalists' time so that we can do more original reporting, we can have deeper source relationships, and we can break more stories? Some people within newsrooms obviously did things that weren't reporting, and some of those things over the last 20, 30 years of digital media have evolved. We've added skill sets.

We've added teams, SEO, I mentioned before, social teams where I started at the Telegraph. Those didn't exist. In fact, the social media team didn't exist until I became the social media editor, and then it became- Right... a team and a skill set that, that belonged in a newsroom.

So I'm sure this will produce some new roles adjacent to newsrooms, within newsrooms, new ways of thinking about journalism. Conceptually, though, the role of reporting out information, breaking stories that somebody doesn't want you to know about, that to me seems pretty strong i- looking into the future. Yeah. And actually, I would hope journalists spend more of their time doing that and less of their time doing all the many other things that all of us [laughs] who live in newsrooms experience.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that there's a actual... I, the, you know, there's a lot of doom and gloom. I don't know if you know.

There's a lot of doom and gloom in this profession. I've heard. I, yeah, I don't know that- Yeah, maybe... you know, of course- Maybe different over there...

there are things to have your eyes open about and, and, you know- Yeah... change- But I think there's- 'Cause change isn't-... there's a hopeful-... what anyone would want.

But there's a, yeah- There's a hopeful- Completely agree... view where the actual reporting that is at the heart o- o- of, of journalism actually becomes more valuable, and I think a lot of times people get hung up on the construction of the artifact, whatever the artifact is. That may change, but it needs the raw material, and the most valuable raw material is non-public information. Is- Yeah...

you know? So- And most of us, wherever we ended up, whatever kind of accidental or intentional path we walked down in journalism, started out down this route because of uncovering fresh information. Yeah. Like, that is the driver for, for most people in this industry, I think, still.

And I think loo- looked through that lens, it's really a pretty positive future. Okay. Cool. Kate, thank you so much.

This was really great. Not at all. Very much enjoyed our conversation. Thank you.