What have Florida taxpayers gotten for the $142,274 we paid "Politico" since 2016?

You, taxpayer, are *currently* paying Politico $44,834 for its "premium" policy and climate news products. What is it selling; and what are you buying?

Four different Florida state government agencies have paid a total of $142,274 to the “Politico” media organization since 2016.

Three of the agencies — the Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO), the Department of Financial Services (DFS), and the Department of Education/Board of Governors (DoE/BoG) — pay for annual subscriptions to the same product: Politico Pro.

Pro is a “premium subscription service designed for professional use,” according to Politico’s sales material. Those three agencies have paid annual fees varying between $4,959 and $11,340. DEO is currently paying $11,340 for “Pro” annually, while DFS is paying $4,959 and DoE/BOG $7,290. I do not know what accounts for the difference. It’s not clear from the entries on the “Florida Accountability Contract Tracking System.”

I also have no idea why the GOP state government can’t negotiate a single instance of “Pro” for much less than the $23,589 three different agencies are paying today, collectively.

A fourth agency, the Department of Environmental Protection, is paying Politico $21,245 for a different product: “E&E News,” which Politico recently bought and which includes “EnergyWire ClimateWire E&E Daily Greenwire E&ENews PM” 

I didn’t know Florida state government officials were even allowed to say the word “climate,” much less pay $21,245 for “news” about it. I find that sort of amusing.

Can we see the “seamless platform” and the policy outcomes?

It’s important to step back and remember that you and I, fellow citizens and taxpayers, own the agencies in question. We own the contracts with “Politico Pro.”

So what deliverables are we getting? It’s pretty unclear. The purchase orders don’t say much. Here’s how Politico describes “Pro”:

By far the most telling sentence in that is how Politico defines professional: “a person engaged or qualified in policy as one’s main paid occupation rather than a pastime.”

Your value as a “professional” to Politico is not what you do or produce. It’s an entirely a function of who pays you and how much — because that’s what matters to the business model.

As a non-professional, who is nevertheless paying for Politico Pro three different ways with my tax money, am I entitled to access each of the government’s instances?

Can I at least get a demo and an itemized account of usage and deliverables?

Narrative insurance, not policy assistance

If “good public policy” is the outcome that spending $145K on Politico Pro and E&E Wire is supposed to create, well … how that’s going in Florida?

The Ron DeSantis abortion rate is massive and surging; rents are way up; foreclosures are up; insurance costs are absurd; the teacher shortage is massive; NAEP scores are catastrophic as always, and wages are down, as they always are, against the US as a whole. We’re are also very very old. See this:

Ron DeSantis, Florida's most prolific abortionist

And this:

Even COVID couldn't slow Florida's perpetual JebSantis NAEP collapse

Has state government used Politico Pro to fix the insurance market? How did that work out? LOL.

In my humble opinion/observation, the government of the state of Florida is not buying “policy” assistance from Politico Pro. It’s buying very cheap narrative insurance. It’s successfully trying to prevent:

• Any issue I mentioned above from becoming a sustained political/narrative with the potential to loosen power’s hold on power.

• Any personal or agency scandal becoming a real political problem.

• Free Politico’s best journalism work from having any actual influence over power and policy.

Like a restaurant that makes its big money on corporate catering

As a business — and that’s how you have to think of it — Politico reminds me of an upscale restaurant that makes its real money off corporate catering.

Free Politico is quite capable of doing good work. In fact, doing enough good work to be superficially credible is vitally important to its business model. Free “journalism” is a loss leader for what makes it real money— narrative creation and selling to institutional and corporate buyers. Here’s a good explainer from last year.

Politico started heading into the 2008 election cycle with an approach that treated politics like sports, churning out articles at the speed of the internet and establishing itself quickly as a must read beyond wonks. That was the advantage of politics: It gave off consumer heat. Paring that influence and attention with Politico Pro proved to be a very powerful combination. Politico Pro is the nuts and bolts of the Thousand True Fans model. With 22 policy areas, ranging from agriculture to financial services to immigration, Politico Pro starts in “the high four figures” and is usually over $10,000 per seat. 

The prosumer approach has another benefit: a lucrative niche ad category that can command high rates. The advocacy ads publications like Politico, Axios, Punchbowl and others rely on are a cash cow, a niche of the ad market that isn’t gobbled up by Google and Facebook. In fact, Google and Facebook are frequently on the buy side of this transaction. Influence matters. That’s helped Politico build a $200 million business with 30% margins, according to the NYT  (gross or net is unclear). The $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill is another cash cow. 

My unpaid, non-professional work here at “Public Enemy Number 1” is generally ignored by the wider Florida media ecosystem. (You’ll have to decide if that’s because it’s worth ignoring. Perhaps it is.)

So I periodically send some of the dudes at Politico and other places links to my stuff — or encourage them to revisit their own stories in the hope of adding either to their narrative creation. My strategy is to sort of prick their individual consciences or sense of professional journalism ideals.

But I rarely, if ever, have any luck.

It’s not because they’re bad people or bad reporters. Some of them are quite nice. I suspect it’s because the incentive structure of that Politico business model (all of it, the “politics like sports” part very much included) is demanding of their time — and prioritizes getting paid by power, rather than offering sustained critiques or deep-diving its corruption and dysfunction.

At the same time, most Democratic and/or opposition political candidates and their scamming consultants make it very easy on Politico. They refuse to even try to bluntly create sustained narrative themselves out of important issues or agency corruption or personal scandal. In a state where Republican power can and will hurt you, most opposition figures pull punches out of self-preservation.

So it’s hard to expect Politico or anybody to jeopardize their own business model for some sense of the greater good if politicians won’t even do it. Nobody wants to endure a consequence.

But it would be intriguing to see how free Politico would cover a political candidate who made Politico Pro spending an issue — like I absolutely would.

Two examples: Chancellor of Grift Ralph Arza and the Ron DeSantis abortion rate

Here are two examples of good single story reporting by free Politico vanishing into the narrative ether.

In 2018, then free Politico (now NBC) reporter Marc Caputo broke the story of the DeSantis campaign banishing powerful charter school lobbyist Ralph Arza from his campaign because of his “hurtful and disgusting racial slurs” and criminal behavior. This was a helpful story for DeSantis, who was under scrutiny at the time over racialized remarks about Andrew Gillum.

Ralph Arza is a convicted criminal witness tamperer, who spewed drunken threats and racial epithets at a political rival. He was kicked out of the Legislature for it in 2006. He has not reformed his aggressive, bullying, bare-knuckle approach to advocacy at all.

Yet, Ron DeSantis, after “banishing” him with great show in 2018, has allowed him to act as a sort unofficial chancellor of grift for the giant House of Grift that is Florida’s Department of Education.

Ralph is in the middle of what I consider Ron DeSantis biggest and most long-term threatening (and Trump-vulnerable) scandal — the massive DoE/Jefferson County/MGT charter corruption debacle, which has already quietly ended the once-powerful Richard Corcoran as a thing.

Free Politico has not once re-visited its 2018 Arza story or asked a single question of DeSantis or anyone in power about what the hell Ralph Arza is still doing at the center of Florida education power today.

Will free Politico ask anyone why the Florida DoE spent $55,000 last on 215 luxury hotel rooms (430 room nights) at the Orlando resort hosting the Florida Charter Conference — where Ralph Arza gave a “keynote address?”

I bet they will not. Anyone care to take that bet?

Now, do you think the $39,080 that the Florida Department of Education has paid for Politico Pro since 2016 makes it more or less likely that free Politico asks these questions?

Second example: I fully credit free Politico with alerting me to the scale of Florida’s surging abortion rate. This was an excellent story.

And then it just died.

Now, it’s hard to blame free Politico that I’m the only writer or politician or public figure in the state to run with the implications of Florida’s red-state leading abortion rate surging on Ron DeSantis’ watch to roughly 80,000 per year.

Why don’t women want to give birth in Florida? is a question any opposition politician and public official should asking every day. I laid out answers here.

Because unless candidates force free Politico to ask “Why don’t women want to give birth in Florida?” through relentless repetition, they’re not going to ask because the answers are not helpful to institutional power in Florida, which is in turn not helpful to the Politico business model.

I’m going to come back to this in a future article, but in Florida — and much of the country — the GOP is the party of traditional American power: capital power, race power, sex power, law enforcement and military power.

GOP power structures own a lot more capital with which to buy Politico Pro subscriptions. So if you’re trying to influence that power for the greater good or even take control of it and change how it operates, why on earth would Politico ever want to help you or even be neutral?

Politico is a business; and it’s a business inherently hostile to your interests if you’re an idealistic citizen. Treat it that way.

You, idealistic citizen and/or typical voter, are not a “high value” reader — except to me

Someone I talked to about this suggested that other Florida media organizations have similar deals to Politico’s. I couldn’t find any; but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. And I’m not really here to criticize Politico for figuring out a way to make money.

I am here to remind its readers that Politico doesn’t care very much about you unless you can pay. That’s just a reality. Journalism and public policy are supposed to be idealistic. But the common good does not show up on Politico’s balance sheet.

Readers are not customers — unless they are “high value” readers in some other way.

“High value readers” is the term that Florida Politics’ publisher Peter Schorsch used with me when I asked him about some similar issues a few months back.

Schorsch is a pioneer in successfully merging business and political journalism and lobbying in Florida. I think his business model is different in its specifics than Politico’s, but similar in its view of power and its incentives for interacting with it.

And I really appreciated how direct Schorsch was in saying this to me:

Florida Politics specializes in breaking more news than almost any other Capitol outlet. Other outlets have the ability to go deeper in their reporting, but they don’t cover as much ground. We are wide, they are deep. It’s a good balance.

There are many, many, many stories out there. [DoE/Jefferson charter scandal] is not a particularly interesting one to me. Education policy reporting is not a speciality because it’s not particularly attractive to high-value readers, whereas health care policy reporting is.

If you are reading me, most likely, Politico and Peter Schorsch and the few remaining winners from the collapse of traditional journalism do not consider you high value. Politico would say I’m not professional because my time and my work are donated.

But my “low-value” readers do at least know, now, that we are all paying Politico and Ralph Arza (or least his hotel rooms) out of our tax money.

Politico didn’t tell you either of those things; and neither did Peter Schorsch.

By contrast, I think it’s worth my time to tell you those things — just for their own sake — even if that makes me a hopeless, amateur, low-value idealist.

If it has a bias, the Florida media ecosystem, like the American one, has bias against idealism and sincerity. Against caring. It has a bias toward cynicism. To care is to make oneself vulnerable to power and pain in a world of compounding vulnerabilities.

You will get laughed at for caring about what happens to your community.

Nothing sustains existing corrupt power structures as effectively as cynicism; and power despises nothing so much as idealism. It wants to mock you for caring sincerely about your civic space. If power makes caring about idealism socially and economically painful enough, you’ll stop, or never even start.

I have the opposite goal, to try to make you care, so that together, we can build a future built on something better than cynicism.