Politico ups the ante for subscriptions

Bucking the trend of print publishers cutting back to reduce costs, Politico is actually growing. The company is hiring 20 more reporters and editors and 20 employees on the business side to expand its coverage for Politico Pro, its news subscription service. “Tomorrow morning, we’ll announce plans to launch Politico Pro Defense and Politico Pro Finance—a package of coverage that will include financial services and tax policy. To produce that coverage, we’ll be growing our newsroom dramatically,” editor in chief John Harris, executive editor Jim VandeHei, and COO Kim Kingsley wrote in an email to the staff announcing the news. Politico is betting big that further investment and expansion of its subscription service will mean more revenue for the media outlet. It’s also been expanding its presence in Manhattan. According to The New York Times’ Christine Haughney, 4,000 copies of the daily newspaper started showing up on newsstands in January and were sent in bulk to Wall Street firms and advertising companies.

So is this a model that traditional publishers should follow? That remains to be seen. Part of what Pro has going for it is that D.C. is a place where people are willing to pay big bucks for specialized content. In the capital, “there’s a huge hunger for information,” VandeHei told The New York Times’ Christine Haughney. “There’s just a large number of people who do stuff professionally who need that information.” A five-person subscription to Politico Pro can cost a hefty $8,500, and other publications might have a hard time finding the right niche to pay that kind of money. “Enough execs and lobbyists are willing to pay to learn more about what’s going in the center of bureaucratic power and what it means for them to make it a serous business for many publications,” paidContent’s Staci Kramer noted. “Getting people to pay small fees on a meaningful scale for local news is considerably harder in some respects than signing up enough four-figure subscribers for those endeavors.”

• Politico to Expand Its Subscription Service (NY Times)

• Politico doubles down on subscription biz (paidContent)

• POLITICO to expand POLITICO Pro (Politico)

• Politico Announces (Three Times) Plans to Expand Pro (Mediabistro)

• Politico set to hire over 40 new staff to expand premium coverage (editorsweblog.org)