Politico has announced Politico Pro will become a free quarterly magazine while keeping exclusive web-only content for subscribers. Fishbowl NY announced the new quad-nual publication from Allbritton. While it is hyperlocal in covering catch-all issues like energy, technology, lobbying and health care with the slogan “We’ll spare you the boring, jargon-laden stories,” Pro has built itself steadily online over the last year.
Nieman points out the “pricing starts at $3,295 per year. But most Pro subscribers are part of a group membership, and those start at around $8,000 per year for licensing content from a single vertical to five people.” Share the content and you get banned. It’s like all the giddy exclusivity from 2003 of having Hotline sent to your Blackberry and printed for your daily media packet at 6 a.m.
You can hardly put a cost on information in Washington if you recall the exorbitant fees for Hotline. Even if, in the case of “House of Cards,” that information is incorrect it’s still the sexy type of power that makes folks want to eat ribs and address an unseen fourth wall. Still, if Politico Pro could tell us where to find decent ribs to eat while lamenting our attempts to be Secretary of State, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad? We’ll wait to see when the new quarterly “will be distributed on Friday, March 22 to every member of Congress, the White House and all federal agencies as well as to 160 newspaper boxes and 100 Washington-area Starbucks. Like POLITICO’s newspaper, the magazine will be free with a circulation of nearly 40,000.”
“When we launched POLITICO Pro in 2011 our mission was to deliver exclusive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting and dominate coverage of the most important policy areas,” said POLITICO Chief Revenue Officer Roy Schwartz. “We are thrilled with how quickly Pro became the essential news source for thousands of policy professionals working at the country’s most influential organizations.”
If you’re feeling particularly generous via social media, you can always use their hashtag: #GoPro2013.
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