NYT Column: Inside Politico’s Billion-Dollar Drama

THE MEDIA EQUATION

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/29/business/media/politico-robert-allbritton.html

Inside Politico’s Billion-Dollar Drama

From “son of” to mogul in his own right: Robert Allbritton just became the unlikeliest winner of the new media sweepstakes.

By Ben SmithAug. 29, 2021, 6:43 p.m. ET

I was sitting in a bar next to John Harris, a former national editor of The Washington Post. It was late in 2006, and he was recruiting me for a new project, a superblog called The Politico. I was interested, but I had a few questions about the owner. I had never heard of Robert Allbritton and I asked if he’d be the kind of billionaire publisher who wanted to see his own column on the front page, or if he’d be the other kind of wealthy owner, a dilettante who gets quickly bored with his new plaything.

Mr. Harris answered my question in cryptic Washington-speak: “He went to Wesleyan.” And it seemed to me that his mention of the freethinking liberal arts college in Connecticut meant something like: “He’s mostly harmless.”

Mr. Allbritton turned out to be a bit more than that. The Washington heir, whose Georgetown existence and mild affect put him at a considerable distance from the larger-than-life characters in the red-hot center of digital media, has scored the kind of deal his counterparts in New York and Los Angeles only dream about: a billion-dollar sale.

On Thursday he reached an agreement to sell Politico (the “the” got dropped early on) for a billion dollars in cash to the German media company Axel Springer, meaning that he had pulled off what is probably the most successful exit in its generation of new media, in pure business terms. Mr. Allbritton, who had sunk more than $50 million of family money into Politico by 2018, is now among the most successful media investors of the century — although Politico, which never entered the buzzy venture capital fray, had rarely been mentioned among hot media start-ups.

“We kind of disadvantaged ourselves by not taking VC money because we just weren’t part of the conversation,” Mr. Albritton said.

Now, he added, he’s pleased to be handing his company over to Axel Springer, a swashbuckling outfit whose Berlin tower long stood as a gleaming middle finger to the Communist East.

“In some ways, they’re more American than most Americans are these days,” he said. “They’re about freedom of the press, they’re about freedom of thought, they are blatantly pro-Translantic alliance.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/29/business/media/politico-robert-allbritton.html