Politico is seeing “significant growth” in Europe as it celebrates the tenth birthday of its edition on the continent.
The politics and policy-focused publisher is growing “particularly” quickly in the UK according to its senior executive editor in Europe, Kate Day.
Day told Press Gazette that ten years ago “we were then a tiny team in Brussels trying to figure out whether this recipe that had worked so successfully in America could be transported to Europe”.
A decade on, Day said the company had “pretty emphatically” shown that it did. She said Politico now employs around 350 people in Europe, of whom approximately half are journalists.
In the UK specifically, Politico’s editorial team numbers about 45 – up from 18 at the end of 2022. Its Paris and Berlin presences are “a little bit smaller”, Day said, but “growing pretty rapidly in both places”.
Asked whether the company saw further room to grow by setting up in yet more national capitals, Day said: “That’s certainly one of the ways we’re thinking about growth. The other thing that having bodies of reporters in some of these key power centres opens up is the ability to use that muscle to benefit readers somewhere else.
“So we now have, for example, a tech team in California, a strong tech team in London, in Paris, in Brussels – of course in Washington. There are some synergies that come from having reporters in all of those places that give us opportunities on tech as a policy area.”
Politico’s subscription B2B product, Politico Pro, generates between 50% and 60% of its turnover, Day said. “Pro essentially does what [flagship morning newsletter] Playbook does for a more general politics-obsessed audience, for people interested in individual policy areas.”
Politico Pro customers tend to be “people who work within policy, who have a professional stake in politics – either within government or in lobbying organisations or at businesses – who need to know policy information for their jobs. We want to get those people really high-value, exclusive information”.
[Read more: Politico launches new Pro subscription product on UK tech policy]
Besides tech, policy areas covered include healthcare, trade, defence and energy. Output from those verticals include traditional editorial products like newsletters but also tools like a “stakeholder management” system and a new AI-powered “policy intelligence system” which creates bespoke policy reports based on Politico’s data and journalism.
That system – debuting a little over a year after Politico parent company Axel Springer inked a deal with OpenAI – had been “going down well with the subscribers who’ve tried it so far,” Day said.
Much of Politico’s newsroom AI use revolved around translation. “In Europe, we’re dealing now with teams reporting in many different languages, and we have found that to be incredibly useful.
“We still have a pretty robust system of editors taking responsibility for what is published – so we’re not writing stories with AI tools directly, but we are experimenting with AI in our workflow. And we’re finding that unlocks lots of possibilities… because it is somewhat complex dealing with teams who are working in different languages!
“It’s journalistically one of our secret weapons, and one of the things that makes my job the most fun.”
[Read more: Politico embraces generative AI web crawlers with website redesigns]
Politico’s website, meanwhile, is largely unpaywalled (with additional premium content available to Pro subscribers) and Playbook goes out for free to whoever signs up. In the past month, sponsors of Playbook have included Rolls-Royce, Goldman Sachs, Lloyds Banking Group and financial software company Intuit. Rolls-Royce’s takeover promoted investing in the company’s combat air systems as a way the UK government could “deliver a step-change in growth” and Lloyds spotlit its call for one million new social housing units.
“Because our audience is a specialist political audience, it tends to be pretty high-value, highly-targeted advertising,” Day said.
The advertising versus subscriptions split is similar in both the US and European sides of the business, with a slightly heavier weighting toward subscriptions in Europe.
The US operation, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in January 2027, remains “a much bigger business”, Day said, but “significant growth is coming from European markets, and in particular from the UK”.
The company says it is consciously attempting to bring its two transatlantic sides closer together – most prominently with the installation of former UK editor Jack Blanchard as the writer of the original DC edition of Playbook.
Day, who joined Politico a few months after the European edition launched, hired Blanchard in 2017 and together they created the UK version of Playbook. She said he knew “how to keep it that magical mix of incredibly useful and therefore agenda-setting, but also a real pleasure to read – a sort of guilty pleasure, if you like.
“That mixture of really sharp writing and reporting, incredibly focused on useful information, combined with something that is genuinely pleasurable and enjoyable for a readership – that’s quite addictive. Jack gets that better than anyone else I know.”
Politico executive editor on DOGE run-in: mixed B2B subs and advertising model means ‘we’re not overly reliant’ on any one customer
Earlier this year Politico found itself in the unusual position of becoming the subject of a DC story when the US government said it would cancel its contracts with the publisher, which in 2024 totalled $8.2m.
Commentators supportive of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and its quest to shrink the size of the state alleged Politico had been “funded” by the government, something the organisation hit back at in a letter to readers saying the money had wholly been for Politico Pro services.
Asked how material of a hit those cancellations had been to the company, Day said “we’ve responded by covering Doge and Musk in the way that we cover everything else, really. In true Politico style, we took our West Wing Playbook and refocused that to cover DOGE and the remaking of government.
“That is a story that’s really key for all of our readers and subscribers in Washington, but also here in Europe…
“So far we’re feeling pretty good about it and feeling like that is connecting well with the audience it needs to in DC particularly.”
Politico’s global revenue was $250m in 2023, according to Vanity Fair, so those US government contracts likely represent approximately 3% of the company’s total turnover. Asked whether the episode indicated vulnerability to governments taking issue with its coverage, Day did not seem concerned.
She said Politico has “an awful lot of clients across many markets now. And so really that helps mitigate it. We’re not overly reliant, and I think that’s one of the nice things about a B2B subscription model actually – you’re reliant on serving a broad base of readers, and they need you to provide them with the best information possible. That’s a pretty good way of funding very strong journalism”.
And despite broader fears of an advertising slowdown as businesses fret about a possible recession, Day said Politico’s ad sale numbers “are looking pretty healthy for this year”.
The mixed, B2B-focused subscriptions and advertising model that powers the company, she said “has a robustness to it that is very helpful in periods of uncertainty…
“All the various disruptions in all kinds of ways across everything that we cover is keeping us all very busy, but I don’t think it’s rocking the business at this point.”
Looking ahead to the immediate future, Day said Politico plans to build a pub.
The publisher collaborated with CNN to run a grill at the Democratic and Republican party conventions in the US last year and repeated the idea this February with a pub at the Munich Security Conference. (There was “a bit more drinking probably in Munich,” Day said.)
“We got very good feedback from a lot of the delegates, and we want to now bring it to party conferences in the UK.”
Politico already runs “happy hours” at the conferences, but Day said “we feel like we’re ready to take that up a degree” and build “a space for political conversation, making news, but also bringing people together”.
Asked to what extent Politico was truly building a pub, as opposed to simply taking over a pub that already exists, Day said: “From what I understand, more at the constructing something end of the spectrum.”
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