Why the cofounder and CEO of Axios says focusing on ‘smart brevity’ pays off

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Transcript

Alan Murray: Leadership Next is powered by the folks at Deloitte who, like me, are exploring the changing rules of business leadership and how CEOs are navigating this change.

Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I’m Alan Murray.

Michal Lev-Ram: And I’m Michal Lev-Ram.

So, Alan, today’s guest on the podcast was journalist turned entrepreneur and CEO Jim VandeHei, and he is the cofounder and chief executive officer of Axios. He’s also the cofounder and former CEO of Politico. And I know you guys go way back.

Murray: Yeah, I hired him at the Wall Street Journal for a brief period of time before he became an entrepreneur. But Michal, as you know, the media business for the last couple of decades has been a very tough business to be in and to have founded two successful media organizations, both still going strong today is quite a credit.

Lev-Ram: Yeah, this was a really fun interview and definitely hit home, I think, for both of us. Jim had a lot to say about his pretty unconventional path to success and to leadership. He shared his journey about starting off as apparently, it turns out, an underachieving student. We talked about his GPA and someone who really struggled academically and then just kind of found his niche, found his calling as a political journalist and as an entrepreneur, and a leader, which is not always the mix.

Murray: Yeah, it was great to have a journalist on the podcast. I mean, as you know, Michal, most journalists aren’t necessarily great managers or entrepreneurs, but Jim is the right form of the breed, and he has a really interesting perspective on the turbulence that we’ve all lived through in media over the last few years. So it was fun to pick his brain.

Lev-Ram: I also got to turn the tables on you a little bit because, speaking of journalists-turned-leaders and managers and CEOs, you fit that unique category as well. So that was really fun for me and hopefully for our listeners to hear about too.

Murray: And we found out unexpectedly, I think, that Jim is not just a journalist but a wellness guru. So some good advice in this episode. Let’s just jump right in.

[Interview begins.]

Thanks for joining the Leadership Next podcast, Jim. I know the highlight of your career was 25 years ago when you were working for me, but I’m not going to ask you about that. I want to ask about the two decades since then when you’ve started two successful media companies, first Politico, then Axios, in a period, frankly, that has been brutal for media companies. I mean, about a third of journalists are gone from the scene. The roadways are littered with failed media companies. And I think Michal and I would love to know, what’s your secret of success?

Lev-Ram: You painted such a great picture there, Alan.

Jim VandeHei: Well, thank you for that. Yeah, media is not an easy business. Like you talk to a lot of CEOs that they probably operate in industries that aren’t that hard necessarily to make money at. It’s really hard to make money in media. It certainly has been the last 20 years. You know, we did Politico now 17 years ago and started Axios almost seven years ago. And in retrospect, most of the stuff I now know about running companies or even realize about why I became an entrepreneur, I only realized in retrospect, but I think being a journalist who was interested in business helped a lot because, especially when you go back 17 years, Alan, and you know this better than anyone, journalists are so skeptical of business people. And so there was this massive divide between business and editorial that made companies almost dysfunctional. And the fact that I was a journalist who had some credibility as a journalist, who also learned to be a businessperson and learned to be a leader, I think I was able to get our companies to do more faster without a lot of the internal politics and drama. And that might seem small, but in a media company where your margin of error is so thin, if you don’t have that alignment between editorial, business, technology, marketing, you’re toast. And I think that’s why most media companies of the internet era are dead or dying or will be dead soon.

Lev-Ram: What were some of the other learnings from the Politico days? Because I know you and we’ll get into more of the leadership stuff later and some of what you’ve been writing about, but what do you think are the main learnings on the business side?

VandeHei: Well, I mean, I get like Alan’s not joking with you. Alan made me. He basically hired me out of obscurity at Roll Call to go to The Wall Street Journal. I was a journalist, didn’t plan on becoming an entrepreneur. Kind of was an accidental entrepreneur and then I had to become a CEO. So literally every single thing I know about being a CEO, I learned usually by doing it the wrong way, but doing it just by doing it and being a journalist, picking up the phone and asking people who are really good at it to explain to me how you actually do this job that I now hold. And so I learned everything from like even simple things, like how do you create a culture, right? I never as a journalist, like I roll my eyes if you talked about a culture. Like I didn’t have any interest in that, like I wanted to break stories and get my editors to leave me alone. Now suddenly you have to get people to perform optimally. And I realized, man, if you don’t have like this culture where people get along with, they have clarity of purpose where you really are like being a stickler about having high achievers around you, the whole thing kind of breaks. So I learned, I learned about culture. I certainly learned about trying to find people who aren’t just like you. Like my first instinct when I was in leadership is to find a bunch of other like maniacs like Jim, which I kind of was back then. And it turned out we just had like an asylum of maniacs, and our turnover rate was astronomical. I realized, Oh my God, if we’re going to have a sustainable company, I can’t turn over 40 percent of my staff every year. So I had to learn, how do you calibrate? How do you find people who might have complementary skills so that you can actually run a business? But like every day was a learning lesson and in retrospect, that was awesome because I think I’ve become a much better leader or CEO because of it. But it’s not like, I didn’t go to school saying, Hey, I’m going to go be a CEO or I’m going to be an entrepreneur. I went to school and thought I’d be a journalist.

Murray: Well, let’s talk about that, because I learned something about you today that is a sign of my bad diligence at the time I hired you, that you graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh with a GPA of 1.49. I didn’t even know that was possible to have a GPA of 1.49.

VandeHei: I’m going to fact check you. I had a semester where I had a 1.491 and I barely graduated. Yeah, I was a terrible student. Awful.

Murray: Well, why? I mean, you just talked about yourself. You were clearly a high achiever.

VandeHei: No. I was a late bloomer, dude. I was not a high achiever. I was like a high achiever drinker. I was a high achiever poker player. And I was really, really good at delivering pizzas, which I did about 50 hours a week. But it wasn’t until I found journalism and really moved out to D.C. where kind of, Oh my God, I can get paid to be mischievous, I can get paid to learn, and it turns out I’m a decent writer, it turns out like I knew just enough to be dangerous and I fell in love with what I did. That’s when I kind of became a professional version of me. But when I in the book, like I open up with this, there’s no spin. Like if you met me at the age of 20, you just said, Ah, that guy is going to be an awesome late night shift manager at Little Caesars. [Laughter. Hard to hear.] …start a company. I was smoking Camels, drinking beer, getting shitty grades, like the perfect…

Murray: Perfect. The perfect background for media.

VandeHei: For a reporter Yeah, exactly. Most reporters are…

Lev-Ram: By the way, and I think a 1.49 GPA, let’s just round it up. We can say it was 1.5. Okay?

Murray: So the benefit of the doubt.

VandeHei: It’s like singed into my brain.

Lev-Ram: So, so okay. So I actually, I want to ask both of you a question because it’s not lost upon me and probably listeners that both of you are journalists turned CEOs turned leaders. And what is it about the journalism part that, like, you can’t quite quit because even as you’ve become leaders and again, I’m putting you both kind of in the same bucket here, both of you write quite a bit. You talk to people. You’ve got that like curiosity. So how do you balance those two?

VandeHei: I’d be curious to hear Alan’s take. I’ve thought a lot about that question, so I’m curious.

Lev-Ram: Alan, you go first.

Murray: This is not the way this podcast is supposed to go.

Lev-Ram: I know, but you know, this is rare that we get to have another journalist turned leader on.

Murray: You know, this story, Michal. I started my career at the age of nine. I walked up and down the neighborhood street and took notes on what everybody was doing and had a little jelly sheet mimeograph machine and ran it off and sold it for a nickel. I could get 30 copies off of the jelly sheet and I sold each one for a nickel. So what’s that? It’s not a lot of money, but the point is, for me, the two of them went hand in hand from the time I was a little kid. I know that’s not typical for journalists, but I was always kind of doing both.

Lev-Ram: Jim, what about you?

VandeHei: You know, I again, I only figured this out in retrospect, but part of like, I can’t quit journalism because I can’t quit being curious and I like writing, right? But also the things that I did well and to be honest, I learned them at The Wall Street Journal. So back at The Wall Street Journal, the thing that you guys pounded into my head was this idea of a conceptual scoop, finding two or three things that fit together that other people aren’t seeing to tell a bigger story. And so it almost taught my brain to think in a fact-pattern recognition form. So by the time I become a CEO or an entrepreneur, it turns out that helps a ton when you’re trying to figure out what’s happening in all these adjacent areas, you can start to kind of predict what the future might be or have a better lens into what the future might be. And then being a reporter and being a CEO, one of the things you’re good at is asking questions and knowing what question to ask and having the confidence or humility to ask it, which I do all the time to this day. Like if I don’t understand something or I see a competitor do something interesting, I just pick up the phone and I’m like, Why did you do that? And if someone asks me, I’ll tell you too. I don’t care. Like, competition is good for the soul, and so I think it helps a lot. And I think it’s why Alan’s been successful.

Murray: Well, so I want to talk about your second startup, Axios, because you started it on the concept was a simple two words: smart brevity. And I think about that all the time because it really goes against the grain of journalistic culture. Michal knows this well. We’re here at Fortune, which has had a hard time making the transition from a magazine to digital. We’ve done it now, but it took a long time. And that was partly because the reporters and writers here thought that the highest form of journalism was a 5,000, 6,000-word magazine story. And the notion that you can be brief and feed people information that they need in a very smart way at the same time may sound pretty straightforward to people, but it’s not. It’s not in our business at all.

VandeHei: Yeah, I mean, so one of the things I noticed at Politico, one of the things I taught myself to do is stop writing or thinking about journalism the way that I wanted to be and start listening to the customer and I was watching what was happening in terms of consumption with people in positions of power or just ordinary consumers, and I noticed that almost no one was reading anything. They were there hunting and pecking, and they were often reading the first couple of paragraphs or they were gravitating towards newsletters instead of stories, even when they were paying a premium to buy that product. And so by the time we started Axios, we said, listen, like there is like there’s an efficiency revolution. People want their information tighter, but they also are going to need to know more across more topics if they want to be really successful professionally. They’re going to have to understand technology and information consumption and politics and cultural trends. And so that’s where the smart brevity came up with. We need really intelligent coverage on important topics but delivered as efficiently as humanly possible. And we were pretty confident that that was going to work and almost instantly it did, like it instantly kind of just hit the sweet spot of where especially people who are in the professional class who are consuming content, it just met the moment. And I remember like knowing that we were on to something bigger than I realized in the first couple of months. I was getting hundreds of emails from readers saying, Thank you, you’re saving me time, you’re respecting my intelligence, you’re trying to make me smarter, faster. I was like, Damn, those are the exact same words we’re using internally.

Murray: It’s huge.

VandeHei: We’ve never communicated that externally. And it showed that we had product market fit. And, you know, that blossomed into a book on smart brevity that blossomed into a company that we split off, where we train companies to be able to communicate internally using smart brevity, and we now use AI to power that. And so like that, one kind of fundamental observation led to a lot of different kind of enterprises, which has been like really fun…

Murray: And I think it’s huge. I think, yeah, I think a lot of your competitors, you know, a lot of us in the media business still haven’t learned that lesson you learned. And it’s partly because journalists haven’t sufficiently thought of themselves as a customer service operation. They’re more like artists. We create great journalism for people to read as opposed to we’re trying to provide information in a way that people want to consume.

VandeHei: Yeah, not at all. They’re indifferent to it. I don’t even think most journalists care how many people are reading their story or whether or not the company can make money off of it. They’re like you said, they think they’re artists or prophets or whatever. And the truth is, like a lot of the content they were producing is kind of garbage. It’s meandering. It’s not easy to read.

Murray: We never did that at Fortune, by the way

VandeHei: No, but part of smart brevity in the format was handcuffs on reporters because I was so tired of saying, just tell me the one new thing that you have. Just tell me why it matters. Stack the information in hierarchical order. Realize no one wants to read 2,000 words of your beautiful poetry, and it put that stricture on it. And basically anyone who came to work for us realize you’re going to write in smart brevity. So we filtered out all the people who are like, No, I’ll never do that. And it’s worked. And I do think journalism’s better about this than it was back then. But this idea of think about trying to get people to read your news like Bezos would have thought about trying to sell a shoe on Amazon when he bought Zappos or whatever. What did they want? What do they need? Meet them where they are, as opposed to me selfishly trying to push them to do what I as a big-J journalist think they should do?

Lev-Ram: That’s really interesting. I mean, there absolutely is this knee jerk reaction against thinking like an entrepreneur, but I think you guys have shown that you can do that and uphold a level of quality and integrity in this kind of a format. One question about AI, because we can’t have a conversation without bringing up that acronym. What’s your take on it and the role that it could or should play in newsrooms?

VandeHei: I mean, my view of AI in general is that in all likelihood it will be as big or bigger than the advent of the smartphone and all the technologies that flowed from it. And I think unlike the other technologies, we have a head start. We kind of know a couple of years in advance about roughly what’s going to hit us. And so I spend almost all of my time thinking about what is the news consumer going to look like in that environment and how do we best serve them? I spend less time going to the big companies and I do talk to them, the OpenAIs, the Anthropics, the Googles, the Microsofts. And, we talk to them about trying to get paid for our content that they’re using to be able to feed and train their large language models. But that’s not going to make or break our company. What’s going to make or break the company is can we figure out how to deliver expertise and distinctive journalism and in-person and virtual connectivity with a huge audience when things move to whatever the next platform is? And that’s what’s fascinating about AI is we don’t know. We know we kind of have an idea of what AI will look like. We’ll have these personal assistants and they’ll know if you want their news sung to you by Taylor Swift or they want it bullet points by Jim. We kind of know that, but what we don’t know is is it going to live on a phone? Is it going to live on a watch? Is it going to be a chip in your brain? We don’t really know what the actual delivery device will be, but I do know it’ll be a much more personalized world where there’ll be a huge premium on trust, expertise, and distinctiveness. And if we can deliver that, I think we’ll be in a good position as a company.

[Music starts.]

Murray: Jason Girzadas, the CEO of Deloitte, US, is the sponsor of this podcast and joins me today. Welcome, Jason.

Jason Girzadas: Thank you, Alan. It’s great to be here.

Murray: Jason, our ideas about work, where we work, when we work, how we work, all of those have continued to evolve since the pandemic. Is that a problem for business or is it an opportunity for business?

Girzadas: It’s a massive opportunity although I think the answer is less clear. It is a profound set of challenges, to be sure, but in the end it’s an opportunity to create a workplace, particularly in the face of more long-term systemic talent workforce constraints and limitations that brings out the best of a workforce so people can be their genuine self at work, can have heightened levels of productivity and feel supported in all that they do. But I don’t think the models are clear and we’re seeing lots of experimentation whether that’s around hybrid and what does it mean to actually co-locate and what degree of co-location matters? It’s also a function of how does technology get embedded into the workplace such that employees and workforces feel supported and enabled, and also the cultural elements related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and feeling supported to be your genuine self at work? It’s the combination, Alan, of all those factors that we think companies will innovate around and find novel ways to bring together that will be highly desirous of leading talent and will be a differentiator in terms of businesses using their workplace in their work processes to win in new and different ways.

Murray: Jason, thanks for your perspective and thanks for sponsoring Leadership Next.

Girzadas: Thank you.

[Music ends.]

Lev-Ram: I want to ask you, I know you’re coming out with a new book. This book is more than 300 words. It’s not written in bullet points.

VandeHei: There’s a lot of bullet points.

Lev-Ram: Okay. The whole thing is not bullet points. Yeah. Tell us first about the book and sort of why you wrote it, because it’s much more personal than Smart Brevity and is that kind of I mean, do you still see I’m assuming there’s a time and a place and a market for longer format and for different formats of content?

VandeHei: Yeah. Yes, both. Very good question. So the book is called Just the Good Stuff. It comes out at the end of the month like, please buy it. I wrote the book because I’m for what you were just asking about. Alan and I are kind of, there’s only a few of us, people who who basically became entrepreneurs and CEOs, but also happened to be journalists. I kept detailed notes along the way because I’m learning all of these things about how do you manage? How do you deal with millennials? How do you deal with people who are difficult to deal with? Kept really close notes. And I think I’m a decent storyteller. And so I put together this book on all the lessons I’ve learned from screwing up in college through, you know, starting and selling a company to, you know, starting another company. And basically every chapter is written in smart brevity. Every chapter is very much like, here’s a topic, how to deal with a bad boss or how to think about your happiness outside of work, but it’s all written in very kind of a fun, blunt way, but with takeaways. Like five things where you could actually apply it to your life or to your job. And my hope is because I’ve written about some of this in columns that I do right now for Axios, like people are hungry for, like I want to apply specific tactics to get ahead either in work or life, and hopefully it hits the sweet spot there. To your question about is there still a place for long form my belief is there is, but you got to empty out the middle. I think 95 percent of content should be super-duper efficient. It should be almost like a utility. It should be in smart brevity. I think almost everything in the middle should die. And then I think anything that is a book or a magazine article should truly be worthy of your time. You should be able to allocate the time to read a 5,000-word piece or a 25,000 word book, because every chapter is worth your time. And it’s interesting because before this book, I wrote a book called Smart Brevity. It sold 200,000 copies. It sells a thousand a week still. And I remember when I talked to the publishers, I was like, I don’t know why you guys want to give me an advance. I’m basically writing a book saying that no one reads your stuff and that your book should be a hell of a lot shorter. But this is what’s interesting. I think five publishers bid on it. And I’m like, What the hell’s going on? Well, it turns out because of Kindle and because of e-books, they know how much of a book you’re reading. And it turns out nobody’s reading the book either.

Murray: They buy it.

VandeHei: They’re reading the intro, they buy it, they hunt, they peck, they skim. And very rarely do they actually read the whole thing. So the thesis actually met what their reality is in the book publishing industry. So, you know, it’s fun. I mean, it’s good to be able to share the stuff that Alan and I have learned.

Murray: I don’t know if you remember this, Jim, but Michael Kinsley, in the pre-digital days when you couldn’t measure those things, Strobe Talbott wrote a book on arms control, and Michael Kinsley went into a bunch of bookstores and stuck a piece of paper on like page 75 of several hundred books saying, If you find this piece of paper, call me and I’ll send you $25. And he didn’t get any phone calls.

VandeHei: That is brilliant.

Lev-Ram: You can’t really do that with Kindles, I guess.

VandeHei: Brilliant and sobering.

Murray: Very, very sobering. Look, having worked with you 25 years ago, I’m not at all surprised that you went on to found two successful media companies, but I am a little surprised to see you’ve become a self-help guru, you know, and it’s not just leadership. It’s like life hacks, diets, meditation. What going on there?

VandeHei: You’re not the only one who’s surprised. I’m kind of surprised by that, to be honest. Mainly it started with we were trying to figure out a way to work with our audience on things that weren’t so heavy. So, we started ending the night with this thing called “Finish Line,” where it’s like something fun, something uplifting because you’re doomscrolling all day. As part of that, as I started to write a couple of columns about lessons learned being a manager and having kept those notes and the response was just humbling. It was like overwhelming. It was clear people were interested in it. And so I just sort of kept going with that. And most of it is about how to get ahead at work, how to get ahead in your profession, how to be a better manager, how to be a better leader. But like the older I get, I’m, you know, Alan, you and I aren’t spring chickens anymore, right? You start to think of…

Murray: You’re a lot younger than I am.

VandeHei: …the things that surround it. Right? Like I’m only really good as a CEO if I’ve got my crap together with my wife and my family and my, my health and my diet. And so I have started to write a little bit more about that. Again, part of it because like I’m a writer.  To yur question earlier, the you know, I have this weird spinal disorder where over time my spine is going to turn into one fused brick. It’s run in my family for generations. And so I’ve had to become maniacal about fitness. And so I’ve used that to be like, whatever, that kind of sucks. But here’s the things that I’ve been able to do that aren’t medicinal, that are able to help continue to be really healthy at my age. So I’ll pass that along. Seems to resonate so I’ll pass a little bit more along. And so yeah, that wasn’t a twist that I expected and you know, I didn’t expect to write a book on all this stuff, but given that, it does seem to be helpful to some people. And like in all seriousness, like the high school college stuff like having been such a bad student, having come from kind of just a normal small town in the Midwest, part of writing the book is to hopefully get it to people that aren’t in New York and Washington and to say, Hey, listen, you could be wherever the hell you are going to the community college because of how awesome this country is like, you could go on to start companies or be a CEO or interview a president. Like if I could, I guarantee you you’re more impressive as an 18-year-old than I was. And so, like, it’s possible and that’s that’s a big theme of the book.

Lev-Ram: Can you talk a little bit more about some of the hacks that that have worked for you and just maintaining that wellness, I guess, and the kind of balance that you need to do your job as a CEO well?

VandeHei: Yeah. I mean, I think all this stuff is particular to your passions and your own habits and your own circumstance. But like for me, I’ve realized like, listen, if I’m going to run a company and I’m going to be the chairman of another technology company and I try to write books, I can only do that if I’m performing optimally. And so like for me personally, I created what, my wife always rolls her eyes when I say this, but like my happiness matrix. Which is I have this idea of, okay, I work best if like my relationship with my wife is good, my relationship with my kids is attentive, my relationship with my parents is strong, if I’m working out, if I’m getting enough time to fly fish, if I’m spending enough time on my faith and whenever I’m off, I know that if I one of those buckets is off. And so I’m constantly in my mind doing an inventory. If I feel off like, Oh man, I guess I haven’t like paid enough attention to the kids or I haven’t paid enough attention to going off and golf or fly fish or whatever it is that gives me sanity. And so I think that more than anything has really helped. And then two is just who you surround yourself with. We’ve all been at companies where you work with people who just suck the life out of you. And if there’s one thing I’m most proud of about Axios is at 550 people, we don’t have any of those people. I’ve become really good at being able to sniff out even high achievers who are bad people and executing them, like getting them out of my company as quickly as possible. And it has this weird effect where like when your energy is all positive and you’re dealing with smart people who are high achieving, but they’re in it for the right reasons, it just has a psychic effect on you because you’re not spending your time going like, Wow, that person’s a jerk or man, that person’s a drag or I don’t want to be anywhere near that person. And when you don’t have that, I think the combination of those two things has helped me really enjoy the work that I do, but I think be better at the work that I do.

Murray: Jim, you’ve proven you can make a media company work in this crazy environment, but Axios, I would say, is kind of an elite media product. It’s playing to kind of smart, educated people who are looking for quality information. And we still have a problem in terms of getting information to a larger group of the public, to citizens, to, you know, having some sort of basis of common information that people can work off of that you need to make a democracy work. Local journalism has pretty much collapsed. It’s amazing how little of it is left of any quality and social media has taken over the information function that used to be played by newspapers. How do you think about that and what can we do about that?

VandeHei: It’s not an easy one to solve because I think if anything, it’s getting more complex because I think that basically media has shattered into all these shards of glass, right? There’s like 20 different information ecosystems. So my kids might be following topics or celebrities or influencers on TikTok that I’ve never even heard of on topics I would never care about. And they could be sitting at the same table next to my wife, who gets most of her news on Instagram following people that she respects, that I’ve never heard of on topics I’m probably more aware of but aren’t my sweet spot. And they could be sitting next to me who’s getting my news from more elite sources of news. And so the common truth thing, hard. The way that we’re trying to attack it is we’re now in 30 cities. We have at least two or three reporters on the ground and our hope is to get into 100 cities. And our belief there is if we can get people to trust us at the local level, then we can start to get them to trust us with national content, which is more radioactive to a lot of consumers, and hopefully gradually get into the hands of more people, more high quality information so they can make good decisions.

What you hit on, I think, is one of the reasons that I probably work as much today as I did 20 years ago. I really, really, really worried about information inequality. I’m more worried about it than I am about income inequality. I really am. Because if you have just a small sliver of people who are taking advantage of what to me is information nirvana, if you know how to search really high-quality information right now, there’s just tons of good information, it allows you to almost have a bionic brain and make better decisions. But if 90% of the population doesn’t have access to that information, it is trapped in an information bubble that’s kind of polluted or full of misinformation, bad things happen. And so I think like the answer to it is hopefully people like me and people like The Wall Street Journal and new entrepreneurs, this new class of entrepreneurs tend to be journalists becoming entrepreneurs, we’ve got to keep fighting the good fight because at the core of what makes, I think this country just, I don’t get the hangdog thing about people that are down at America, I just think this place is amazing. And the fact that, like I could start companies or write whatever I want without fear of having to go to jail, I think it’s just an exceptional thing. But to have that, you need a free press. You need people like telling you hard truths, you need people holding people in positions of power to account, and then to gather all these things, make democracy and capitalism the best thing on the planet in terms of a governing structure. And so I worry a lot about it. I think it’s why you’re still in the game. Why I’m still in the game. I like a lot of people that we respect who have ideas about how to keep this thing growing and vibrant are still in the game and we need that. We need more people.

Lev-Ram: Sticking with the local news angle, what are the demographics of your readership on that piece of the business show so far? Is it different? Are you reaching a more, a broader, more diverse crowd on the local side?

VandeHei: There’s actually very little overlap right now with our national audience. So it’s definitely a broader, more diverse group. It tends to be fairly similar, though, characteristically in terms of college educated people, make a decent amount of money, in all likelihood, like, care about the restaurants they can go to and care about the local technology or business scene. And so it’s expanding our audience, but it’s not like, listen, there’s a hard to get group. My guess is most people in this country have better things to do than to consume news most of the time. So those people have always been really hard to get to. They were, even at the heyday of TV and newspapers, they were still really hard to get to. Like they might have gotten the newspaper but only looked at the comics or gotten the newspaper, or only looked at the want ads. That is a tough group. But I think half the country or a big chunk of it, is hungry for news and hungry for information, which is almost a better description than news these days, but hungry for information to make better decisions.

And then I think we still we meaning, Alan, me and our fraternity of people in the media have a lot of work to do to undo the damage that we did. I think the people who are mad at media have a right to be mad at media. I think the way that reporters, some of whom I respect a lot, have behaved on Twitter and behaved when they’re on cable TV have made it really clear what their ideology is. And in some cases, like we’re just a little too damn condescending about Trump voters. Regardless what you think about Trump, like whenever you sneer at people, what do you think they’re going to do? I can tell you exactly what they’re going to do because I grew up with those people. They’re going to give you a middle finger and they’re not going to give you a second chance. And I think some of us in the media like we have an obligation to like come on, let’s try to get to the closest approximation of the truth. Let’s deliver information and news that’s really useful to people. Let’s not put our thumb on the scale and let’s equip people to make better decisions. And readers aren’t dumb. They can tell if you’re trying to do that. If you’re trying to do that, they’ll reward you either through audience that you monetize through ads or a paid subscription or attending your event, whatever it is like. So that that is where we fix the system.

Murray: I think that’s well-put. Thank you for that, Jim. I have a really important last question here. I have not read your new book. It’s still on pre-order. And you didn’t send me a review copy.

VandeHei: Well, I need to sell books.

Lev-Ram: You got to pay for it, Alan.

Murray: But I’m looking at the table of contents here and there are a lot of chapters, but I know they’re very short. Chapter 48 and 49 are called Bad Bosses and Good Bosses. Okay, which chapter am I in?

VandeHei: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, you know, Alan. Alan was a great boss. He hired me the army when I was a young kid, when nobody else would have hired me to do that job.

Murray: Well, it’s only because I didn’t check your college transcripts.

VandeHei: You know, it was a rush process, thankfully. And as I said, the book comes out at the end of the month. It’s called Just the Good Stuff. All the money goes to a foundation we set up for kids who need help getting to college or to vocational training. I don’t make any money off the book. And hopefully it helps people, and I think that’s at the end of the day, it’s probably your question why does Alan still write? Why does Jim still write? It’s like we think it makes a difference. We think we’re putting information in the hands of somebody and it’s helping them to live a better life or make a better call on something. And I think that’s we’ve  been blessed, like we get to do something. I think Alan would say the same thing. We would do what we do for free. It’s just fun.

Lev-Ram: Thank you, Jim. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to sneak in an Alan question as well. And thank you, Alan, too. Great conversation.

VandeHei: Thank you both. I appreciate it.

Murray: Leadership Next is edited by Nicole Vergalla.

Lev-Ram: Our executive producer is Chris Joslin.

Murray: Our theme is by Jason Snell.

Lev-Ram: Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media.

Murray: Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune’s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.