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Updated ,first published
Washington: US politics and policy juggernaut Politico will launch in Australia later this year, taking on the established press gallery in Canberra with a product that targets local and global readers alike.
The project will be led by former Politico editorial director Ryan Heath, an Australian who has also worked in politics in the United Kingdom and Europe.
Politico’s daily “Playbook” is considered a must-read in Washington, with its blend of daily news, who’s who, insider gossip and upcoming events. It said it would launch “Canberra Playbook” after the winter parliamentary recess.
“Politico’s expansion to Australia is natural,” said the company’s chief executive officer Goli Sheikholeslami. “We will deliver the same essential US and European coverage that our audiences in the Western hemisphere depend on.
“And we will be even better positioned to help readers around the globe understand important economic and geopolitical developments in the Indo-Pacific, from trade and defence to energy and critical minerals.”
Heath said Australians needed journalism that explained power dynamics and connected the dots globally, and Politico was ideally poised to deliver it.
“We take politicians and policy seriously – it’s all we do. We will bring that depth and new angles to political journalism in Canberra, just as we have everywhere else we operate,” he said.
Heath grew up on the NSW Mid North Coast and attended the University of Technology Sydney.
He worked in Whitehall in the UK and as a speechwriter for the European Commission before co-founding Politico Europe in Brussels. He later became the outlet’s New York-based editorial director before moving into consulting.
The Australian embassy in Washington hosted an event with Politico in November when the outlet’s senior journalists discussed US politics and power dynamics for an Australian and American audience.
Politico launched in 2007 and has since grown to become an outlet with more than 1000 journalists in major cities including Washington, Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin and New York, it said. It launched ahead of the 2008 US presidential election through mostly ex-Washington Post staff.
Its global expansion led to its sale to German publisher Axel Springer in 2021 for $US1 billion ($1.42 billion), after it had helped launch Politico Europe six years earlier. Aside from a suite of German publishing assets including mass-market tabloid Bild, Axel Springer also owns Business Insider and Morning Brew.
It formed part of a wave of new digital upstart news brands to take on traditional newspapers, like The Post, covering news with a focus on politics. A similar wave hit Australia’s media industry in the 2010s, though many, such as the HuffPost, have since folded.
The Guardian and Daily Mail’s digital launches have survived, however, and both are now regularly in the top 10 most read news providers in the country.
There have been few new international news entrants into Australia aside from venture capital backed-Capital Brief in the past five years.
Axel Springer has been an early adopter of AI in publishing. It was one of the first major media companies to sign a deal with an AI provider, OpenAI, in 2023. Though it’s chief executive Mathias Döpfner’s rapid adoption of it came back to bite last year, when unionised Politico staff took the company to court alleging the AI provision in their contracts had been breached, according to reports.
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
Calum Jaspan is a media writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Melbourne. Reach him securely on Signal @calumjaspan.10Connect via X or email.From our partners
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