An Oral History of When Politico Came to Capitol Hill

When it launched on Jan. 23, 2007, POLITICO promised its readers an “unblinking focus” on covering politics. “We will embrace the way journalism is changing,” an early mission statement read. The subjects of that coverage — the lawmakers and staffers who populated Capitol Hill and the White House — weren’t quite as ready to embrace that change.

With its relentless pace and radically different standard for what constituted news, POLITICO at turns confused, thrilled and maddened its audience in the nation’s capital. It was both serious and mischievous, high and low, in print and on the web, substantive and fun, with a twist of tabloid. It was fast and aggressive. It frustrated press secretaries and offended the at-times tender sensibilities of the 200-year-old institution that is Congress, demystifying the protocols and personalities that made Capitol Hill run. While it turned deadlines upside down — days and hours transformed into minutes and seconds — it also satisfied a “thirstiness” for community among Washington professionals wanting to see and be “seen” in Playbook. It was ambitious — and it ran its own reporters absolutely ragged.

Daniel Reilly, one of the early Capitol Hill reporters at POLITICO, recalled: “You truly felt like you were on a high-wire tightrope between two skyscrapers with no parachute.”

For POLITICO reporters, it was disorienting and exhausting. But it marked a more fundamental adjustment for the hundreds of lawmakers and staffers who populate Washington, suddenly confronting a new set of rules about what gets covered and when. This is a brief history of the chaotic early days of the newsroom as seen from Capitol Hill, based on interviews with more than 20 “major players,” to borrow early POLITICO parlance, including the House and Senate staffers and the reporters who covered them. News was getting faster. Political coverage was starting to democratize the workings of the Beltway. And legacy newspapers across the country were facing existential cuts. On Capitol Hill, the ground was shifting underfoot, for better or worse, faster than anyone could see.

All titles refer to the jobs people held at the time in 2007; this transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

I. “WHAT’S ‘THE POLITICO’?”

An internal POLITICO memo dated Jan. 2, 2007, three weeks before the publication’s launch, laid out 10 points for what a story should be. “Does this story explode a myth or reveal a new truth?” one read. “Would a congressional aide email this story to a friend?” asked another. The guidelines weren’t about specific reporting targets. They asked how to “get SOMEONE’S juices going.” On Capitol Hill, some staffers and lawmakers were wary. Others got it right away. “I worked for Chuck Schumer and you never had to explain anything about the media to him,” said Matthew Miller, communications director at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Nancy Pelosi, the newly empowered House speaker following Democratic gains during the 2006 midterm elections, agreed to an early interview with POLITICO. “Worst case scenario: ‘Oh well, it doesn’t last — at least we only did one interview,’” said Brendan Daly, her communications director. “We’ll move on from there.”

BRIAN WALSH, communications director for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas): People were naturally skeptical given how ingrained Roll Call and The Hill were among the Capitol Hill community at that time. People were still wrestling with the print versus digital mindset.

TONY FRATTO, deputy press secretary for President George W. Bush: After we got our asses kicked in the midterms, we were talking a lot about a different Washington. We were already in a period of evolution in media. There were lots of quaint conversations going on like: What do you do with bloggers? Do you have bloggers come in the press room? What do you do with digital reporting? We were right on the cusp of trying to figure out social media. Same thing with blogs.

KRISTEN HAWN, communications director for the House Democrats’ Blue Dog coalition: For so long, everybody would go to their desk, and the staff assistant would have put all the papers — like, physical copies of papers — in your chair. And that’s where you get your news for the day. I tell some of my younger staffers sometimes, ‘They’re called clips because we actually had to clip them out of the newspaper, tape them together, and fax them to our bosses.’ It’s so ancient.

BRAD DAYSPRING, communications director for the Republican Study Committee: At that point in time, if you’re looking at other news outlets, the websites didn’t update in seconds. The same stories would stay on the website all day. The website would just be like a copy of the paper. (Disclosure: Brad Dayspring now works for POLITICO.)

TONY FRATTO: I was rooting for them. But I wouldn’t have bet money on them.

BRAD DAYSPRING: In people’s minds, “different” may have been a more edgy Hill or Roll Call. When it launched, it was far more disruptive than anyone imagined.

BRIAN WALSH: Roll Call came out twice a week. The Hill came out once a week. They hit the desk of every Hill staffer. People devoured them. People didn’t know how that would translate digitally.

BRAD DAYSPRING: It was the equivalent of going from a horse and buggy to a combustion engine, in terms of just speed and regular cadence throughout the day. The only real equivalent were bloggers who updated regularly, and they just were considered, at that time, second-class citizens in the journalistic realm.

DON STEWART, communications director for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): As soon as it came out, it was clear: It wasn’t just a third newspaper. The Crypt blog and all that. They were breaking news like crazy.

KEN VOGEL, POLITICO staff writer: At first, the skeptical coverage was that we didn’t need another The Hill or Roll Call. Then it was, “This is for people like Rahm Emanuel and people who want to be like Rahm Emanuel. Insiders and wannabe insiders.”

ALEX CONANT, spokesperson for the Bush White House: I understood it to be they're gonna cover politics the way ESPN covers sports — Just 24/7, no news is too small to share. As a political junkie myself, that made a lot of sense to me. I just straight-up loved it.

KEN VOGEL: The idea of covering politics as sport — the ESPN of politics — that was meant as a pejorative. But POLITICO just embraced it. Like, “Yeah, that’s it. ESPN is a huge brand. Why would we shy away from being compared to it?” And there were sources who would deal with us because of that: “Oh look, I’m being treated like a player on the Yankees.”

RYAN GRIM, POLITICO staff writer: For our first big scoop, I think the source was Allbritton. He was on a yacht in the Caribbean and spotted Hillary Clinton on another yacht, with some donor, and that was our first scoop.

ROBERT ALLBRITTON, founder and publisher of POLITICO: My mother-in-law had a house on Anguilla, so my wife Elena and I were there for a long weekend. The Clintons were also on the island. I was responsible for one of the first “spotted” as Bill and Hillary had dinner at a beachside restaurant called Mangos with Bob Johnson, former CEO of BET TV. Bill, never out of character, worked every table in the restaurant. I conveniently used the restroom when he got close to make sure there wasn’t a reverse “spotted.” Bill and Elena had a nice little chat. I gave the whole thing to Ben Smith.

RODELL MOLLINEAU, staff director, Senate Democratic Caucus, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.): I think some of the skepticism happened as a result of the hype coming from POLITICO — that this was going to be a game-changer. This was not a low-key rollout.

DANIEL REILLY, POLITICO staff writer: On Capitol Hill, you’re simultaneously having conversations with, with sources like, “What is this? What are you trying to do? Is it POLITICO? Or is it The Politico? And so I remember trying to be like, “Hi, I’m Dan, here’s what my publication is. It’s nice to meet you for the first time. And oh, by the way, can you give me some earth-shattering scoop that can enter the first issue?’”

II. PEAK BLACKBERRY ON CAPITOL HILL

Blackberry Messenger, or BBM, was the hot new thing. Belt loop holsters were everywhere, tucked beneath gray blazers. Blogs were driving the news. Newspapers were losing their advertising revenue. It was a time of change on Capitol Hill, though not every congressional staffer was quick to realize it.

AMOS SNEAD, press secretary for Republican Whip Roy Blunt: There was no Twitter. There were no “hot takes.” And then POLITICO started buzzing Blackberry inboxes multiple times a day. All of a sudden, the hot takes heated up.

RODELL MOLLINEAU: Capitol Hill is notoriously slow on the uptake. Media on the Hill was changing, but I don’t think people on the Hill understood that media was changing. There were a lot of folks caught in their old ways. It was the beginning of wow — news travels fast. News travels really fast.

AMOS SNEAD: There were several times that we were explaining to the rest of the policy staff, to the members, to other offices: What is YouTube? What is Twitter? What are blogs? What is RedState? There were all these new things happening. It wasn’t just one thing. It was like the whole ground was shifting.

KRISTEN HAWN: Before this, if you needed an item out in the middle of the day, the only people that could do that were the wires. So I made a point to communicate regularly with Dow Jones and AP and Reuters. When POLITICO started doing the news of the hour, it became another option.

BRENDAN DALY, communications director for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: We had to convince our members to get Facebook accounts.

MATTHEW MILLER, communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee: Progressive blogs had become a major source of influence inside the Democratic Party. We had a big focus on outreach to progressive bloggers, Markos [Moulitsas] and Josh Marshall, and all the rest. POLITICO just accelerated everything. It was a place where you could throw a punch and land it very quickly. Not like throw a punch and wait for three days to see if it shows up in the paper.

DON STEWART: You used to be able to work a story for hours. When somebody would call you with something, you’d say, “Well, hang on, let me check.” You needed to change the way you responded to things because the post was going to go up, and people were going to see it. If you wanted to have an impact, you needed it to be faster.

BRENDAN DALY: On the one hand, you would appreciate speed, but then that became such an overwhelming focus … You know, was it accurate and did it have context? So someone said that, [but] what does it actually mean? That’s only gotten worse over time.

JOE SHOEMAKER, communications director for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.): It was the “Sports Center” of political reporting. Fast and funny and trivial sometimes. That was very, very different. I was very suspicious of that. I was worried there was more of an emphasis on speed than accuracy.

MATTHEW MILLER: In 2007, for Democrats, the political wind was on our backs, and we were playing on offense in so many Republican places, right? We were pushing things. POLITICO’s philosophy meant that you could launch an attack and it would get covered, and sometimes the other side didn’t have a great amount of time to respond.

BEN LABOLT, press secretary for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.): The industry was ripe for disruption, so I didn’t have doubts about POLITICO’s model. Obama was going to run a disruptive campaign that recognized some of the same things about digital and that questioned the way things had worked before. There was a rapid acceleration of the pace of news — the notion that a reporter at POLITICO, for example, could file four or five stories in the course of 24 hours, and that was happening simultaneously with the launch of the Obama campaign.

ROBERT ALLBRITTON: Everybody was running scared, because advertising was going down. When the recession in ’07 and ’08 came, they cratered.

BRENDAN DALY: There was a boldness to it — that they could succeed when newspapers, even at that time, were starting to fail, and this was a new venture that did really well.

ALEX CONANT: For two years, from 2006 to 2008, I worked with state and local reporters at the White House. When I started the job, I was responsible for about 80 reporters from those states based in D.C. By the time I left the job, it was down to about a quarter of that. The number of state bureaus in D.C. that closed over those two years was really gobsmacking.

ROBERT ALLBRITTON: It was a radical departure, and I had to tell people, “Guys, this is worth doing. Given everything that’s going on in newspapers, everyone and his brother is gonna want to work for this thing. You have a much better chance of this working by taking a risk than by going conservative.”

DAN RONAYNE, deputy communications director for the Republican National Committee: Back then the internet was still relatively new. I was curious to see if this was a fad. What’s this gonna be like? And what I found out is that at 5 or 6 p.m., my day wasn’t over. The news cycle went on and on. They ruined the Tune Inn happy hour. We couldn’t go there at 6 p.m. and talk about our days anymore — at least not without staring at our Blackberries.

III. WELCOME TO THE CRYPT: KEEP REFRESHING

On Jan. 23, 2007, its first day online, POLITICO’s Capitol Hill blog published eight items. They named it the Crypt. “We stalk the halls and wait patiently outside closed doors, so you don’t have to,” the first entry on the blog began. “We like the inside dirt, the horse-trading and the personal feuds & friendships that make Washington so fascinating. We hope to prove some myths about the Beltway and dispel others.”

PATRICK O’CONNOR, POLITICO staff writer: John Bresnahan and I used to sit next to each other in the periodical press gallery at the end of the day, we would copy all of the words we had written for the Crypt and put them in a text document to see who had written more words. Often, it was 3,000 to 3,500 words. I had such bad carpal tunnel, I couldn’t even like close my fingers.

RYAN GRIM: Driving people as hard as they did — it’s the thing that drove it. The media was collapsing. The number of jobs being shed, the number of outlets shuttering was growing exponentially year over year. There was a real existential question about whether POLITICO could make it. In that context, driving people as hard as they did makes sense.

KAREN FINNEY, communications director for the Democratic National Committee: “Here’s my story, do you have a comment? I’m filing in an hour.”

PATRICK O’CONNOR: We were just churning out so much.

BRAD DAYSPRING: You really had to be an alpha hard-driver.

KAREN FINNEY: It had a “bro” culture. I had conversations with women and people of color who were there about what it felt like to be the only person in the room or on a certain beat. It felt like it took the organization a little while to realize that that was something they needed to work harder on.

ANNE SCHROEDER, POLITICO gossip columnist: The bro mentality, fairly or unfairly, is still pretty jocular. It’s an energetic mentality. Right? It’s like, “What are you breaking today? What do you have today?” Jim [VandeHei, POLITICO executive editor and co-founder], I think, used to walk around and say, “Whaddaya got? Whaddaya got?”

BRENDAN DALY: They had to work all the time. Once early on, I remember teasing Jon Allen — I said, “Jesus Christ, you look like hell.” And he said, “It’s because I never sleep.”

ANNE SCHROEDER: It was a lot of fun. It was really stressful. The tensions were high. There was so much pressure, especially on the Capitol Hill guys.

PATRICK O’CONNOR: Jim really wanted to cover everything, because he understood that volume and speed were going to be a differentiator for us. We went both kind of high and low. There was a slight tabloid sensibility.

MATT WUERKER, POLITICO cartoonist: It was a little looser. It was a little bit like breaking the norms of the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt-type reporters politely covering Washington. We shifted the flavor a little bit.

PATRICK O’CONNOR: Both in terms of volume and tone, we were so different from anything else that was operating on the Hill at the time.

MATT WUERKER: They were trying to figure out a way to personalize the bloggers. They came up with the idea to have caricatures. There was a choice of do we do sort of button-down stipple drawings like the Wall Street Journal, and instead, we went with a more cartoonish, a little bit more mischievous take on these people as personalities.

BRIAN WALSH: With the early Crypt blog, they didn’t have to have a fully formed story. That took people some getting used to as well. Frankly, I’m sure there was probably more frustration among their competitors than there was among Capitol Hill staff.

PATRICK O’CONNOR: The Crypt was not going to win any awards for journalism. But we put a ton of stuff in there just because we had to keep it going. That’s where the hallway interviews started to take on a life of their own.

RYAN GRIM: These were basically Twitter posts, if you think about it.

BRIAN WALSH: In certain quarters, it might have rubbed people the wrong way. But it certainly led the way for how reporting on Capitol Hill is done today.

RYAN GRIM: If somebody sent me a scoop, a little scoop, I could write 50 words, paste in a statement, press publish, have it in Drudge’s inbox four seconds later, and it would be on Drudge eight seconds later.

ANNE SCHROEDER: One time, I had gotten this Drudge link, and Jim comes over. He’s so excited. He goes, “Good job. What are you gonna do this afternoon?” I’m thinking, “I just shed blood, sweat and tears for this!”

IV. JUST “ICE IT OUT”

The knock on POLITICO was that it wasn’t serious. This was the line congressional staffers turned to in a fight. Joe Shoemaker, the communications director for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), still has a nastygram he sent POLITICO reporter John Bresnahan in 2007 in the heat of a dispute: “No need to talk,” he told Bresnahan. “Only have time to deal w/ serious publication these days. Best of luck.” Elsewhere in the Capitol, some staffers were inclined to try to shut off POLITICO’s access altogether.

BRAD DAYSPRING: There were two distinct camps: You had, “Not a serious publication, tap on the head, push to the side.” And then there were others, usually younger communicators, who saw a lot of opportunity in it. The challenge for that first group is there was a group of people like me who said, “No, I want to go faster.”

AMOS SNEAD: Some people said, “You know, just ice it out and hope the thing folds, it’ll go away. It’s not serious, blah, blah, blah, whatever.” They were completely wrong. The power shifted on Capitol Hill towards communication staffers who were willing to engage.

BRAD DAYSPRING: There were many in leadership who did want to slow this thing down. They didn’t have the ability, because there were those of us who were pushing it and pushing it.

DANIEL REILLY: You could feel the word “blogger” in italics. Blogger was used as an epithet — like a dirty word. “You guys are just bloggers.” It was: “Oh, you don't need to talk to them. They’re a blogger.” And then one by one by one, all of these legacy media outlets started some version of a blog embedded in their site.

BRIAN WALSH: It really forced their competitors to change, to adapt. We’re trying to adapt quickly, as well. If you knew that they were going to post something quickly, it forced us to respond quickly and kind of upped everyone’s game. POLITICO had this mantra that they wanted to be the first to report everything. Earlier and faster than everyone else.

JOE SHOEMAKER: It was not unusual for me to get an email from Mike Allen at 5:30 in the morning, or 2:30 a.m. I do remember being disoriented by “What the hell is this guy doing at 5:30 in the morning?” You know, gathering string on us on some stupid story.

AMOS SNEAD: POLITICO ignited the Beltway media arms race. This was a fairly sleepy place, and then all of a sudden profile pieces of leadership staffers started appearing. And all of a sudden there’s a profile of Neil Bradley from the whip’s office. And there’s like a cartoon sketch of him, and it’s in print. And it was new. A new day of Washington, sort of famous for D.C. self-promotion, was born. Staffers could get profiles.

KRISTEN HAWN: Back then, people would just cover the leadership and what leadership was doing, what leadership was saying. And it really was an outlet that gave some of the rank-and-file members a voice and an outlet to speak through.

AMOS SNEAD: From a staffer standpoint, it really did shift power more to the communication staff, because when you used to get a media inquiry, you had 8 to 12 hours to respond. And by that time, you would have to go to the legislative director, get policy input, get the chief of staff to sign off on it. And then maybe the member would see it, then there would be some edits. And then you would get the quote. And when POLITICO came in and said, “Hey, we’re going to run this in an hour and a half,” or “We’re going to run it and then if you have a reply, we’ll put that into the story too,” [then] all of a sudden, communication staffers were going directly to the chief, or directly to the member. It gave them more access, because that was required to keep up with the speed.

STACIE PAXTON COBOS, national press secretary, Democratic National Committee: POLITICO became a way to communicate both with the other party, to test the waters and sometimes to communicate within your own party.

MATTHEW MILLER: I don’t think you can overestimate POLITICO’s impact in changing the way other publications cover Washington. By virtue of POLITICO moving things so quickly, it had an impact on the Post, the Times and everyone else. Within fairly short order, other outlets didn’t feel like they could wait til late at night or early in the morning to publish a story.

JOE SHOEMAKER: Leadership and rank and file members were freaked out. Everything became a negotiation around deadlines. “Can he call you at 2 p.m.? 2:55 p.m.?” I got so sick of it.

V. ESTABLISHING CREDIBILITY, COURTESY BUSH

On Feb. 14, 2007, George W. Bush called on POLITICO’s Mike Allen at a White House press conference:

THE PRESIDENT: Michael. Michael, who do you work for? (Laughter.)
Allen: Mr. President, I work for Politico.com.
THE PRESIDENT: Pardon me? Politico.com?
Allen: Yes, sir. Today. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: You want a moment to explain to the American people exactly what — (laughter.)
Allen: Mr. President, thank you for the question. (Laughter.)

DANIEL REILLY: Everybody on the Hill watched the live presidential press briefing. That was a big day. It gave us more legitimacy.

AMOS SNEAD: I remember Mike Allen being called on in the White House by George W. Bush. And he said, “What’s The Politico?” At that moment it went from like, “This thing launched,” to “God, they send a lot of emails,” to “Holy shit, they’re getting a White House question.” And it was really fast. I just remember the speed of that and thinking, “Okay, something just changed here.”

DAN RONAYNE: The president calling on someone with a question is not random.

ALEX CONANT: He asked Mike what POLITICO was, and it just lent so much credibility to the organization right off the bat.

JOE SHOEMAKER: Only a few months later, POLITICO sponsored a Republican debate in the primaries. I was stunned that this upstart news agency had done it that quickly.

ROBERT ALLBRITTON: I think somebody asked me early on, “How many of these things do you want to do to make it successful?” I was like, “We’re going to do all of them.” I am not going to have this thing blow up and then have to deal for years with, “What if I had just done that one more thing — would that have made a difference?” If I do everything I possibly can to make it work, and it fails, I’ll be fine. Just push on every single front.

DANIEL REILLY: Once that debate happened, especially on the Hill, we felt like we had legitimacy that we didn’t have before. Four months later, you’re in a room at the Reagan Presidential Library, or like writing questions for presidential debates. It was another, “Oh, my, you know, we’re building tracks and the train at the same time” moment.

ROBERT ALLBRITTON: When Mike Allen joined, it was like, “Oh, you’re real.” A debate? “You’re real.” Chris Matthews got on “Hardball” and shows a cover of it — “This thing is the greatest thing ever! It’s like crack” — is basically what he said. It was all of that stuff simultaneously.

VI. THIRSTY FOR COMMUNITY … AND HAT TIPS

On June 25, 2007, Mike Allen’s morning newsletter, Playbook, landed in inboxes for the first time. “Welcome to the new edition of the Politico Playbook that’s available by automatic e-mail, giving you a handy, BlackBerry and Treo-friendly peek at the news driving each day.” If POLITICO was a divisive and destabilizing force on the Hill, Allen’s Playbook product had a strange bonding effect as well. It tapped into a need for community in D.C. as much as it did the vanity of the city’s insular bubble.

MATTHEW MILLER: POLITICO definitely identified the thirstiness of people in D.C. before Twitter was invented so that everyone could just reveal it themselves online every day.

AMOS SNEAD: Every two or every four years National Journal would have a people issue that profiled congressional aides. I know people that stuck around an extra two months in their jobs, just to make sure they were included in that. There was no other playing field, right?

ALEX CONANT: Playbook very quickly became a must-read. And, you know, I think everyone would read Playbook on their Blackberry. First thing in the morning. When people start getting iPhones, everyone thought Playbook looked great on the iPhone.

AMOS SNEAD: It sounds really cheesy, but it actually gave you a little sense of community, especially when it started featuring birthdays in the morning. It was like a positive public high five, right? It drew in different parts of Washington.

KAREN FINNEY: In a town that can be so polarized, it was a little bit of a coming-together. You could see whose birthday it was, or somebody getting married, or somebody had a baby, and I could send them an email. It was just nice. There was something personal about it. A human element.

MATTHEW MILLER: In maybe the most shallow way possible, Playbook did become like a gossip column for staffers, showing up at the right time, making sure their names showed up at the right parties and were seen at the right events. I don’t exclude myself from this.

KAREN FINNEY: Maybe it created a little bit of glamour?

BRENDAN DALY: Even the birthday things. I mean, they were goofy. But people read it.

DAN RONAYNE: On the Hill, the pay is terrible. The staff is a lot younger than people think. It’s kind of like a campus. Nothing said you were cool like having a Blackberry on your hip and your birthday in POLITICO.

BRIAN WALSH: It wasn’t abnormal to like, for somebody to go out and buy beer on a Friday and like have a hall party, right? Maybe you had Democratic offices on your hall. And you could sit up there with a few beers and not worry that it would end up online five minutes later.

DAN RONAYNE: If Hollywood did a movie on Hill staff at the time, it would open with someone reading Playbook on a Blackberry with a box TV with “Washington Journal” on in the background with Robb Harleston sifting through newspapers on live TV.

PATRICK O’CONNOR: POLITICO had become kind of a cool thing. But you know, it was like, went from being reviled to being both reviled and kind of cool.

VII. BREAKING TABOOS

Around this time in the Capitol, there was a certain way of doing things. Stopping a senator in the hallway for a question? Normal now, but back then, it could cause problems. “I apologize for grabbing your boss like that on such a big issue. I saw my opportunity and I took it,” one POLITICO reporter sent to a leadership office at the time. “Again, sorry about this.”

BRAD DAYSPRING: Things that happen 1,000 times a day now, and are totally commonplace, were just unheard of at the time. Instead of grabbing a congressman or a senator in the hallway, reporters would call the press flack. The flack would then schedule a time in two or three days. You’d have far more time to prep for the interview.

RYAN GRIM: There was one time where I was in the Speaker’s Lobby, standing next to John Conyers, and he turned to a person next to him and was like — I forget the exact quote — “Somebody just needs to take a two-by-four to his face,” or something like that. I thought, “Great, there’s my item.” I wrote it up in the Crypt. Half an hour later, it’s leading Drudge. I think that caused some consternation: What happened to the sanctity of the Speaker’s Lobby? Like, there’s no sanctity of the Speaker’s Lobby! If you say something out loud around a reporter, that’s news. POLITICO was more willing to do those types of things that just created a lot of drama.

DANIEL REILLY: It’s so quaint to think back on it now.

PATRICK O’CONNOR: There was one story Bresnahan did about the age of many of these senators. John broke this enormous taboo by talking about how old these guys are. And a lot of people cringed and were angry about the story, but the reality was it was a completely valid piece. It was the beginning of what was a huge generational upheaval in the Senate. Nobody else would have written the story at the time.

KEN VOGEL: It was saying things that weren’t spoken. Other outlets would know, “Yeah, that’s the way it works, but we’re not gonna advertise that.” It was seen as distasteful in some ways.

MATT WUERKER: Some reporter came up with the idea to have me do a cartoon illustration of the way the House of Representatives is basically like a high school cafeteria. You can sit anywhere you want, and you sit with your cliques. It’s writing about the odd quirks that happen in a town that has a lot of unwritten rules. POLITICO was really good at sharing that with a broad readership beyond the Beltway, but also even inside the Beltway.

DANIEL REILLY: It was not so much about what POLITICO was doing as the fact that they were the vanguard of rapid changes in the industry. We sort of became the avatar for all the changes. People talked about the ‘Politico-ization of news.’

KAREN FINNEY: I could see the Politico-ization of other news organizations who were trying to [snaps fingers] keep up with that pace — and the pressure that that put on not just the outlets, but the reporters, specifically.

PATRICK O’CONNOR: It really was kind of a mix of low and high. They wanted to make sure that we were getting the very thoughtful conceptual scoops that you would see in the New York Times or Washington Post, but they also wanted to get all the little scoops out too. I remember Jim [VandeHei] lighting up when [POLITICO staff writer] Josie [Hearn] broke a story about Joe Baca saying some awful things to Rep. Loretta Sanchez. [Sanchez told Hearn in an interview that Baca had called her a “whore.”] From a kind of generational and the gender politics at the time, it was obviously relevant.

RYAN GRIM: If you were not an insider, but you were very curious about politics, you really couldn’t learn much about the inner-workings of politics from the Washington Post or the New York Times. Maybe you could get some analysis from David Broder or something, but if you were really curious who the key power players were, and what was driving that, that wasn't really available. It’s democratizing in some ways.

PATRICK O’CONNOR: Other reporters got mad because all of a sudden, every caucus or conference meeting, I had three members in there who were [messaging] me stuff and I was literally writing, you know, four or five paragraphs, and I’d get it up before they were even done with the meeting. Before POLITICO, that really wasn’t happening that much.

DON STEWART: Used to be, you could walk through the hallways in the Capitol and not see a ton of people unless there was a big event going on. But now, you walk through there even on a Wednesday afternoon — there’ll be a ton of reporters staking the place out.

JOE SHOEMAKER: I remember in the late 1990s, when the New York Times had the audacity to publish a color picture on their front page. People went ape shit. You know, like, “the ‘Gray Lady’ is dead,” and so on. Fast forward a decade to POLITICO, and it’s a whole different world. That kind of revolution, I think, seldom happens so quickly in people’s political lifetimes.