Exclusive

Exclusive: Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen Bring on Washington Insiders to Help Run Axios

They’ll help lead the platform, which starts launching its newsletters next week.
Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei.
Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei.Left, by Brad Barket/Getty Images; right, By William B. Plowman/NBC/Getty Images.

A few months ago, Evan Ryan had no idea where she would end up in January. She had spent more than two decades working in the public sector—in communications for the John Kerry campaign, back in the White House for Vice President Joe Biden, and most recently, as assistant secretary of state for Educational and Cultural Affairs. Maybe she would serve in a Hillary Clinton administration. In the mid-90s, after all, Ryan had worked as a deputy director of scheduling for the First Lady and a special assistant to the First Lady’s chief of staff. She subsequently went on to serve as the deputy chair for the governance track of the Clinton Global Initiative.

Then Ryan met with Jim VandeHei, the co-founder and former C.E.O. of Politico, who was getting the wheels turning on his new, much-anticipated media venture, Axios. This was before Axios even had a name (it means “worthy” in Greek, as VandeHei revealed to my colleague Sarah Ellison late last year). It was also before the company announced that it had secured $10 million in financing in a round led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures, which counted as investors NBC News, Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective, and the owners of Atlantic Media Group. It was before it announced splashy hires like Dan Primack and David Nather. It was also before Donald Trump surprised the world with an electoral victory over Hillary Clinton.

But it was smack in the middle of an election cycle in which the term “fake news” became ubiquitous and its implications fateful. VandeHei and his Axios co-founders, Politico’s newsletter whisperer Mike Allen and its former chief revenue officer Roy Schwartz, knew they wanted to create a place for real news, presented in a smart, efficient way without the fluff or the clickbait. One way to do that was to hire Washington insiders, like Ryan, who know how the system works (or doesn’t), who works it, how to get in front of them or get their eyeballs. So VandeHei offered her a job. “When we talked about me being part of it, to think that I could be part of something from the ground up,” Ryan, who will serve as an executive vice president of Axios, told me on Monday. “Fact-based media is more important than ever. It’s important that we have trusted, fact-based news that you can get quickly and easily. Jim and Mike and Roy have a history and great reputations in this space.”

For nearly a year, Axios has been a source of intrigue throughout the media. Given its co-founders’ track records, many assumed that the company would try upending traditional news much as Politico had during its formative years. And while the details of the organization are still coming together, Ryan is not the only unconventional hire that Axios has made. Tim Berry, the chief of staff to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, will join Ryan as an executive vice president. Berry, who came to Capitol Hill as a legislative correspondent more than two decades ago, met VandeHei along the way soon after. This fall, the two started kicking around the idea of joining Axios. After the election, Berry knew he was making the right decision. “For someone who had been doing this as long as I have, the opportunity to exercise new muscles was very exciting,” he said. “[The election] made it even more important to have someone who can explain, hopefully, in a rational way, what’s happening and why it’s happening, especially given the people who are going to be making the decisions.”

It is unusual for a media company to put two individuals who have never had any traditional media experience on a very small executive team amid a time of unprecedented industry turbulence and disruption. VandeHei, however, explained that this was the very notion underlying the hires. “Being able to start more from scratch, one of the things that can differentiate you is having people who are super-experienced in managing people and building things, and people who are super-wired and have true expertise, big followings, awesome connections in Washington, technology, business, and media,” he said on Monday. “So much of what we do is connecting and explaining those different worlds, so being able to leverage the expertise of a Tim or an Evan is a huge advantage for a media company like ours.”

Ryan and Berry will both be tasked with making key decisions for Axios—a mix of high-profile newsletters, which launch next week, and a platform set to debut just before Inauguration Day. And both will be part of the live events the company plans to put on in its early years, VandeHei explained. Ryan will take the lead on marketing and branding, while Barry will have more of a hand in editorial. “I’ve worked in leadership offices for 15 years,” Berry said. “That depth of experience and that kind of deep knowledge about how things work, what motivates members, what’s important, what they read, what they’re interested in, how they absorb information and why they read the things they read. I’ll help with all of that, and being able to say, ‘This is what people care about, this is what they care about, and this is what’s going to interest people.’ ”

That’s an asset Axios is banking on. “There’s no greater attribute in media than being authentically wired into the topics and the people who are making decisions so that you understand why people are doing what they’re doing, and then you can articulate that to your audiences,” VandeHei said. “That’s an amazing attribute that not that many people have.”

Being that authentically wired in typically means taking the easy path down K Street to a deep-pocketed lobbying job. It certainly means bypassing the job insecurity of an administration gig that could be up in three and a half years—or sooner, in the substantially less certain media-start-up sphere. Both Ryan and Berry seemed giddy with the idea of going from government, the antithesis of start-up culture, to getting in on the ground floor of a new venture. “It’s quite a change, which was appealing,” Ryan said. Berry concurred. “Having the opportunity to take what I’ve done and to work for a start-up and a company that’s trying to think in new ways about an incredibly challenging media environment and be central to that is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” Berry said. “I’m not apprehensive, because if it’s anyone I’m going to bet on to figure this out, it’s these guys.”

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