The Media Industry Is in Crisis. Axios CEO Jim VandeHei Sees a Massive Opportunity

Jim VandeHei, co-founder of Politico and later Axios, has spent decades at the forefront of political journalism. In all that time, he’s witnessed seismic changes to the industry but no one, he says, has been a catalyst for disruption and change more than President Donald Trump.

“For the first time in our lifetimes, I would argue that the media ecosystem favors the right more than the left,” VandeHei told Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club.

“The MAGA movement, podcasts, X, how people consume information favor Republicans and really favor Trump. He has everything working for him to stretch the boundaries of what we’re used to in the power of the presidency.”

It’s a drastic shift after years in which the so-called legacy media — which the right so often decries as biased — controlled the flow of news and information to Americans. The splintering of the media landscape, ushered in by the rise of digital media and social platforms, has for better or worse decimated the guardrails and gatekeeping that previously defined the fourth estate.

“You can’t just close your eyes and say, ‘Well, the MAGA universe doesn’t operate, it doesn’t have that much power.’ I’m sorry — it does,” he said. “There are probably scores of figures in MAGA media who have exponentially more followers and bigger audiences across five or six different platforms, many of which people in mainstream media have never even heard of. That gives them power. It’s the Wild West of information.”

Despite those shifts and the general hum of anxiety that permeates a media industry that is facing an unprecedented audience crisis, VandeHei is incredibly optimistic about the future.

He argued there’s never been better access to high-quality information. “This moment in time I find more intellectually invigorating than any other I’ve experienced. Let’s figure out how to fix things, instead of moaning that things aren’t the way they used to be.”

“It’s not going to be great like that again—but it doesn’t mean it can’t be good,” he said. “It just means you’re going to have to buckle up and be ready for extraordinarily high-velocity change.”

Beyond Trump, another figure looms large in the new media order: Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter). Musk has positioned himself as a crusader against journalism, arguing users on X are the media now.

While VandeHei is all for free speech, he rejects Musk’s dismissal of traditional news organizations. “I don’t think just the average person can be a reporter. Just because I have an awesome set of tools and I can see your brain, it doesn’t make me a brain surgeon.”

VandeHei also spoke about news fatigue — his recommendation: “shut your damn phone off” — the media’s coverage of the Biden administration, and how Axios plans to cover Trump.

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: I want to start with the new regime in Washington, D.C. You’ve covered politics in our nation’s capital for decades now, and you’ve been at the cutting edge of that coverage. Have you ever seen anything like this?

Jim VandeHei: No. Nothing close. What’s different is it’s not just that you have Trump and the new Republican rule and you have Trump with more authority, more power, more clout than any political figure I can remember in my lifetime, doing more at a higher velocity than we’ve ever seen an incoming president do. You have that happening while the entire media ecosystem is changing, and a lot of it is congregating in DC. You have those two things happening while you have this really unusual merger almost between Silicon Valley and government. Remember, all these tech moguls used to want to steer clear of Washington, and now they’re buying up houses or becoming members of the administration. You have this merging of the technologists and the governing class, and that’s a lot. Those are huge tectonic plates all moving simultaneously.

What’s your broad assessment of Trump’s first two weeks in power?

I don’t know that there’s been any massive surprises. A lot of this stuff he said he was going to do, and now he’s doing it. Maybe the biggest surprise is that they’ve done it as coherently or cohesively as they have — it’s been a very well-orchestrated rollout of very dramatic changes. Big, controversial picks to run the cabinets, but also really controversial and sweeping executive orders. It’s been done in a way that is so unfamiliar to anyone who watched Trump when he came into office the first time in 2016 when it was very haphazard, disorganized, infighting, lots of leaks. So it’s a much more professionally run White House. I think that Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, really learned — from running that campaign and running it with an iron fist — that there are massive benefits to discipline. I think Trump himself has grown in that area, where the president has now seen the benefits of being more organized.

They’ve done it before — you come into Washington and think you can do this and do that, but it’s a beast of its own. You have people now in the White House like Stephen Miller, who were there before, and they understand how to pull the levers of power. They’re pulling them aggressively and in historic, epic ways that will reshape how people think about government, probably reshape how the courts think about government because a lot of these actions are going to end up before the Supreme Court. It’s a lot. When people say they’re exhausted, overwhelmed, and have anxiety — yeah, check, check, check. There’s a lot going on in the world, and most of it’s happening in D.C. and being generated through the White House.

From your perspective, and I know it’s early, but how much do you think this is actually going to change Washington, D.C.? Thinking politically and culturally, does a more confident Trump White House mean the changes in Washington are going to be more permanent? 

It goes back to what I said at the beginning. You have all these plates shifting at once, so it’s really hard to extrapolate what the world will look like in a couple of years. But here are a couple of points when you talk about Trump’s confidence: it’s not misguided. He comes into town at a moment when the presidency is more powerful than ever. It’s not a king, but it’s getting close. You have immunity or presumed immunity from any acts in office. Over the last 20 years, the presidency has been growing in authority and power. He does this with a Republican Party that he has wholly remade in his image. There are very few anti-Trump Republicans left in elected office. He has a Congress that is not just compliant but true believers. They are MAGA. They were born and raised MAGA. He has a Republican governing majority built in his image.

For the first time in our lifetimes, I would argue that the media ecosystem favors the right more than the left. The MAGA Movement, podcasts, X, how people consume information favor Republicans and really favor Trump. He has everything working for him in his ability to do a lot fast and stretch the boundaries of what we’re used to in terms of the power of the presidency. So the question is, how long does that last? Having watched this stuff for 30 years, very rarely does one party or president stretch things only for the next president or party to say, “You got away with that? I’m going to roll that back.” No, they take that and they stretch it a little bit further. I assume that as he tests the limits of the presidency — both in practice and legally — I think the courts will become involved. If you look at the makeup of the Supreme Court and the backgrounds of its justices, there is a real predisposition toward expanding the power of the executive branch. That part, I think, will last.

His indifference to the media — saying whatever the hell he wants and doing whatever the hell he wants — I think others will try to copy it. He is a unique beast in that he is wholly confident in running against the grain and saying things that no other politician I’ve ever met would. Some dimension of that will surely last. Just how he got elected: not necessarily by spending a lot of money (he did spend money, just not nearly as much as Democrats), but by getting out there and taking advantage of the new information ecosystem. Many of those attributes will last.

I want to talk about the White House press shop. We had a bit of a spectacle at the first briefing. It was hosted by the new press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. She kicked things off in an unorthodox manner, calling on what she described as “new media” outlets first, instead of the major networks. The first question went to Mike Allen, your Axios and Politico co-founder (which was somewhat amusing because, despite your reputation for disruption, he’s one of the most established journalists in Washington D.C.) Putting that aside, how did that come together? Did you know that was going to happen in advance?

We did not know that he was going to get the first question. They had asked if Mike was going to come to the briefing. It’s funny, we had done this interview with Vanity Fair where we had talked about how typically I don’t want our reporters at briefings because everyone is hearing the same thing; it’s a lot of groupthink. The fact that it was the first briefing, there was a reason to be there. There’s a new administration and a new cast of characters, so there is certainly utility in the early days of getting to know people.

Once Mike got there, he didn’t know he would get the question, but he got it. I chuckled a little that we were with the new media, although I’d consider us more new media. I don’t consider us legacy media at all. I consider us new media, and I think it represents something we have really tried to foster and protect. We don’t have an editorial page. We ask our reporters not to pop off on social media platforms. We really try to cover this stuff clinically. It’s not that Trump or the Trump campaign loves everything we write. There are many things they hate. But I think if you talk to most of them, and hopefully the president himself, he’d say Axios tries to get to the closest approximation of the truth. ‘They’re not ideological. We don’t always like what we have to say, but they seem like a smart, well-sourced group of people trying to figure things out,’ I think Mike getting the question was probably a reflection of that.

What do you think of this push from the White House to broaden the pool of outlets that they pick on?

There’s nothing surprising about it at all. Listen, he won the presidency by often going around the legacy media. If anything, the legacy media should probably be thankful that he didn’t push everyone out of the press briefing altogether or line up the first couple of rows with podcasters and folks from The Daily Wire and Breitbart. They could do that. They have the power to do it. But the truth is, while the president was elected thanks to a lot of this new media—podcasts and other ways of getting information—he himself continues to be a voracious consumer of legacy media and more traditional outlets. He understands the power of television and the power of the press writ large in setting a narrative. He feels very confident engaging both sides, and I think the press room reflects that. No one should be nervous about it. They should welcome other people asking questions.

What I tell people is that they need to start understanding the MAGA media ecosystem. Most people in DC have no clue about the power of some of these people. You might not like them, and there are certainly attributes that can be corrosive—like when people push misinformation or just nastiness—but there is also a lot of intellectual activity in MAGA media that ultimately gets represented in public policy through Trump or in the overall theology of the MAGA movement because political leaders respond to those platforms. In some respects, these platforms are much more powerful than many components of the legacy media. People need to disabuse themselves of the idea that legacy media is the gatekeeper. You have the Wild West of information out there. The information ecosystem is now split into 30 or 40 different pieces, and depending on how old you are, what you do, how much money you have, and what your politics are, everybody is getting their information in different places. It’s not surprising that the press room would ultimately reflect that.

It’s clear that the problems facing what we might call traditional media were seriously exacerbated by Trump’s victory. In many ways, he proved that the press was powerless—or at least far less powerful than it would like to be—when faced with his movement, which was in turn fueled by this incredible rise of independent media. You seem optimistic, when most people I talk to are very scared, about the fragmentation of media, which seems to have accelerated rapidly over the last couple of years. You seem to have a more positive view of that. Am I correct?

I don’t know if I have a positive or negative view of it, but to be honest, I run a company. I live in media. I don’t have time to be romantic or whiny about what was—I have to figure out what is and what is to be. My job, my responsibility to the people at Axios, is to understand what the world looks like today and where it might be going tomorrow. What I know for a fact is that it’s fragmented. I can’t un-fragment it, whatever that would mean. I can’t put it back together. What I can do is figure out how Axios navigates this as a source of truth for as many people as possible.

What I would say to legacy media is that you have to keep looking at how you serve the reader, the consumer. If you can attract a big group of people who rely on you as a source of truth or information, and you can serve, please, entertain, or inform them, you’ll make money. It might be in a different or smaller way, but there’s certainly a way to make money in this space. You can’t just close your eyes and say, ‘Well, the MAGA universe doesn’t operate, it doesn’t have that much power.’ I’m sorry—it does. As you just said, there are probably scores of figures in MAGA media who have exponentially more followers and bigger audiences across five or six different platforms, many of which people in mainstream media have never even heard of. That gives them power. It’s the Wild West of information. That’s why I have mixed feelings about whether this shift is good or bad.

If I take a moment to be romantic or introspective, what I like about it is that, if we’re being honest, if you are a smart filter of what’s out there, there is more high-quality information available for free on more topics than at any other point in human history. And it’s not even remotely close. For example, I have a couple of things I have a screw lose about—health, science, and longevity. I can learn way more now just from the free versions of Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman, from their podcasts, Twitter posts, and the stuff they put out on Spotify than I ever could have from reading every major publication in America 15 years ago. That’s awesome. What I tell my kids is, “Listen, the burden is on you.” Just figure out if the sources of information you’re using as pipelines into your brain are high quality. Do they seem like they’re trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth? Are they written or hosted by people with real expertise? If so, awesome — ingest it. And if you want to ingest garbage, you can.

But I strongly encourage people to filter out the crap and ingest really high-quality information. Thanks to the ecosystem out there, you can have an almost bionic brain now. There’s just so much good stuff, and it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor — as long as you have an internet connection, you have access to an incredible amount of high-quality content. I think what you’re getting at is the problem: we have all this high-quality content, but it’s co-mingled in with a massive amount of sludge. And there aren’t many sources that extract the two and make sure you only have the pure form. That puts the burden on individuals.

This attitude you have is different from a lot of people in the media, and I think it’s a through-line in your career. You look at these big changes that are happening and instead of being precious about the past or scared of the future, you seem to embrace what’s coming and find ways for your journalism and the newsrooms you run to tackle that, attract readers, and remain profitable. Is that something you’ve always tried to do throughout your career?

I think it’s something that’s intensified over time. I remember before — your listeners might know — we started Politico before we started Axios. I’ve started two media companies, and I’ve been the CEO of two media companies. Before that, I was just a reporter. I covered the presidency for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. So I’ve had this interesting arc. I would say once I became an entrepreneur — yes, there’s something about the entrepreneurial spirit and mindset. You’re optimistic by nature. You’re not that worried about failure. You just don’t have time to contemplate failure. You have this “I can do it, whatever the problem is, I’ll solve it” attitude, and eventually, it forms who you are. I think I’ve always been a free thinker. I’ve been an open-minded person. There are certainly things where I have firm views, but I’m also curious.

There’s this great line from one of my favorite seasons of TV ever — Season 1 of Ted Lasso. There’s a scene where he’s shooting darts and talking about how people underestimate him. He quotes Walt Whitman and says, “Be curious, not judgmental.” I’ve always tried to be curious and not necessarily judgmental. I’m curious about what’s happening in the world today. So it’s not that I’m Pollyannaish. I can tell you many scenarios that play out badly. But I will tell you that this moment in time I find more intellectually invigorating than any other I’ve experienced. That’s not to say I don’t have huge stressors or that I don’t see potentially huge problems — the nature of our politics, fast-rising AI, changes in ecosystems, sadness among young people, birth rates that are too low. There are all these things I could get spun up about and feel dark about. But intellectually, it’s so invigorating.

And then, to be in the media and have the ability to cover these things and talk to people—not just presidents, but the Sam Altmans of the world, and you, and others in media—it’s an amazing job. I always differ myself from certain reporters when sometimes there’s a hangdog, “I’m here as a spectator” dimension to reporting. I think to myself, “You get paid to ask questions. You get paid to stir mischief. You get paid to hold people accountable, to inform people.” If you do that job, it’s going to make you an inherently interesting person — or at least give you an interesting mind. So snap out of it and let’s figure out how to fix things, instead of moaning that things aren’t the way they used to be. If people liked the way things used to be, they would still be that way. They’re not. They didn’t like it. Move on. Find something new.

You mentioned sludge earlier. One of the biggest drivers of this changing media landscape has been Elon Musk, who I think shocked everyone by proving just how powerful one man can be when you’re in charge of a platform like Twitter and you’re willing to use it to pump out information with a particular partisan agenda — or propaganda, depending on your view of Elon Musk. One crusade he’s taken on quite aggressively is this assault on the press. He has this common refrain that “you” — and by you, he means random users on X — are the media. What do you think about this argument from Musk that the legacy press is dead and that X is where all information comes from now?

Yeah, I had a little spat with Elon about this because I had given a speech to the National Press Foundation in defense of reporters. What I was saying is maybe he is the media. He has a huge platform — I would argue right now he has the most powerful platform in the media ecosystem. But there’s a difference between being a media platform and being a reporter. I will go to my death believing that one of the great attributes of this country is that we have a free press and that, over the course of history, millions of people have dedicated themselves to trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth without fear or favor — doing it fearlessly, doing it clinically, and often having massive differences on small communities, big communities, and the national dialogue.

I believe there’s something special about being a really good reporter, and I think there’s something special about having really good reporting as part of a healthy, capitalistic, democratic, dominant America. I agree with Elon Musk that he has an amazing platform. I would argue he’s the most powerful civilian in the history of humanity because he’s smart enough to realize that political activity and business activity flow downstream from information. And he now controls the most powerful media platform in X, at least for the big segment of the country that voted for Donald Trump—and for a lot of people who didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

But where I wish Elon Musk and I could be of one mind is that you can have both, and you need both. I love free speech. I’m with you on that. I also think you need rigorous reporting with rigorous standards. I don’t think just the average person can be a reporter. The example I used in the speech was: just because I have an awesome set of tools and I can see your brain, it doesn’t make me a brain surgeon, right? There are skills that I need, training that I need, and rigorous accountability around what I do. I believe powerfully in a free press. I love this country. I couldn’t love it more. I’m a beneficiary of it. I love capitalism. I love entrepreneurial zest. We share all of that. I think where we differ is that I believe having a free press is one of the reasons America is unique, is dominant, is free. Does it make mistakes? Absolutely. Should it admit when it makes mistakes? Absolutely. We all should. But I think all these things can — and, by the way, will — coexist.

None of the accounts making this argument that the media is dead are actually uncovering any information. They’re posting information that reporters have uncovered and then occasionally using that to bash The New York Times. But The New York Times, Axios, and any of these publications have reported more in a single day than these independent commentators have ever reported on X. So I always find it to be a maddening argument, but it’s a potent one nonetheless.

For sure. And listen, people were down on legacy or mainstream media before Elon took up the crusade, but it’s getting worse. And I just don’t think America is better off for it. Do I think America is better off having free speech? I do. Do I think America is better off having a lot of competition across the ideological spectrum in the rotation of truth and news? I do. But I don’t think it’s better off if suddenly you shut out all of the institutions that spend a lot of money to do a lot of the hard work, especially on accountability, overseas reporting, and covering forgotten people. That part of the work we all do — that would be bad. It just would be bad. And again, I’ll go to my death in that fight. That is one of my non-negotiables. But in terms of platforms evolving and trying to change how we make money and how we interact with readers, all right, I’m open — wide open. Let’s go figure it out.

When you’re mapping out the kind of coverage of Washington that you want Axios to do over the next few years, what are the places where you think the press erred in the last decade, specifically in covering Trump, where you might be looking to change or refine the way that you cover the news?

To be honest, I don’t know that we have to change much at all. If you look at the history of our coverage, we’ve always been clinical. We’ve always tried to be fair. We had good access to Trump the first time around. Jonathan Swan’s interview with Trump is probably the most famous presidential interview of modern times. That didn’t mean they liked everything we wrote, but I think most Republicans and most people in the Trump White House would agree that we tried to get to the closest approximation of the truth. Where people go off the rails—and if we’re being honest about where mainstream media or legacy media got itself in trouble — was, first, treating the Trump beat like a crime beat, as opposed to recognizing that he was a leading political figure and the president of the United States. Yes, he was testing boundaries, and where he stretched the boundaries beyond the pale, he should be held accountable. But that can’t be the totality of the coverage.

I also think people erred when they took a condescending, sneering tone toward the people who voted for Trump. It’s half your damn country. Be curious, not judgmental. Why are they doing it? You can’t just say, “They’re all racists.” Well, that’s bullshit. They’re not all racists. A lot of my family members and people I know in my extended family voted for Trump. I’m curious. I want to know why. Some voted for Biden. Why? Be curious. When the press or individual reporters came off as condescending, I think it gave a huge chunk of the country the freedom to say, “You know what? The hell with all of you. I don’t believe a damn thing. I’m just going to be a protest vote, and I’m not going to take you seriously. You’re not on the level with me.” That hurt the press.

I also think that on X — actually pre-Elon, so Twitter — was the first time I had seen a lot of reporters I had worked with intimately over the years get on a platform and make it obvious whose team they were on. I thought the media, pre-Twitter, had done a good job — I had worked at The Post and The Journal — until Twitter, I was always the one arguing that people were exaggerating press bias. I had watched the newsroom from the ground floor at The Post and The Journal. I didn’t see that much bias. Occasionally, you would see it, but it mainly came from people not being religious, not being from a small town, or never having owned a gun. I happened to hunt, and I grew up in a small town and grew up Catholic, so I had a different perspective that gave me a more panoramic view of the country. But I didn’t see it back then.

And then, suddenly, on Twitter, people made it really clear who they were cheering for — either by the posts they were making or the people they were following. That further hurt us. I actually think right now legacy media is starting to really see that. I look at The Wall Street Journal, and I think, “I’ve never seen The Journal better than it is today.” They’re doing better coverage, smarter coverage across more topics, and doing it clinically. They’re doing great work. A lot of people are doing great work.

You might not love The New York Times, but in certain areas, they do tremendous work. They have people all over the world trying to get to the closest approximation of the truth. Do I agree with everything on their editorial board? No, but nobody should. That’s the whole purpose of an editorial board or an editorial page. Are there some topics where I think The Times is stronger than in other areas? Of course. Because I’m in the industry, I can filter out what I don’t need to pay attention to. If your takeaway is that Jim’s optimistic, there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the quality of content being produced and what that might look like. But that sits next to the fact that it’s very easy to manipulate people or mold people with either misinformation or emotional garbage.

Yeah. I think a lot of media outlets shot themselves in the foot, not just in the Trump era for having a little bit of hysterical coverage of it, but also during the Biden administration for letting their foot off the gas. Axios didn’t. You had reporters like Alex Thompson, who might have been the best reporter of the 2024 campaign when it came to covering Biden and Kamala Harris. He was unflinching, he was relentless, and as a consequence, he took a lot of crap from the Biden White House, which couldn’t fathom a reporter covering the ancient president in anything but a fawning way. What’s the plan for Axios to tackle the Trump White House?

Our thought is, we don’t need an army. I need two or three or four really good, smart, wired people. And so we have Alex Thompson, who you just mentioned, who I agree was by far and away the best Biden reporter. It wasn’t close. He is finishing up a book on Biden with Jake Tapper over at CNN, and that’ll be out soon. And then, in all likelihood, he’ll move over to cover Trump. He’ll probably still write about Democrats. Mike Allen, one of our co-founders, is always covering everything, but he’s uniquely wired into politics and this White House. And then we hired two people I used to work with at Politico many years ago, Marc Caputo and Alex Isenstadt. Alex Isenstadt has just finished a book, soon to be out, on Trump. Both are widely known in reporting circles and Washington circles as being really wired, really relentless.

All of us have a screw loose for digging — dig, dig, dig. They’re good diggers, and I think they’re respected by both sides. Brittany Gibson is another person we hired. I did not work with her at Politico, but she had been there, and she’s part of the team. You take that with our Hill team, and then — people think of Axios as a political publication because we’re in D.C., but we have just as many people covering AI, business, communications, the media ecosystem, energy, and health care as we do politics.

That allows us to cover Washington in a surround-sound way and hopefully be useful to people like you. That’s the other word I’m hopped up on these days — just be useful. Be useful to readers. Is this helping them navigate their local community better? We’re going to be in 34 cities soon with Axios Local. Is it helping people make better business decisions? Is it helping them understand national debates? Is it helping them understand trends in politics, culture, employment, or whatever topic we’re tackling? If we’re useful, we’re essential, we’re vital, we’ll have a good business and a good reputation.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about cable news. There’s a lot of anxiety in the industry, obviously, about the impending linear cliff. What do you think of the future of the cable news industry?

You’re knee-deep in this, so you probably understand the economics of it even better than I do. It’s a really hard business. It might be an impossible business because you just don’t have that big of a viewership. You look at some of the CNN or MSNBC ratings in primetime and you realize it’s just not that huge. And as people cut their cords and go off and just maybe get their entertainment through Netflix or YouTube or other options, it just gets harder and harder to be able to generate a ton of revenue to have a big TV presence. Now, that doesn’t mean that Mark Thompson at CNN or the folks at NBC and Fox, which continues to be very successful, won’t figure out a way to adapt to those new ecosystems, which they’re all racing to do. And so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if CNN figures it out, because they do have boots on the ground across the world. They do have a brand that’s extraordinarily well known internationally, and they have a mindset of being there in big moments, and that’s something you can work with. So I wouldn’t be surprised if they figure it out.

MSNBC, for the most part, is much, much more ideological. There’s a market for it, for ideological. The left right now—liberal media—has probably never been weaker in my lifetime than right now. So that space is wide open. Could MSNBC, in a digital, social, and traditional TV world, build that into something even bigger? They could. If you have smart leadership, a really good plan, and personalities that people gravitate toward, and they certainly have that. Morning Joe — Joe and Mika — continue to be a force. Rachel Maddow can still draw a big crowd. Nicolle Wallace, who has a great, popular show and really has converted from being in politics to being a TV host, gets good ratings.

So there’s a lot to work with. You just have to change. You just have to stop worrying about how great it was because it was great, and it’s not going to be great again like that. But it doesn’t mean it can’t be good and that it can’t be successful. It just means you’re going to have to buckle up and be ready for extraordinarily high-velocity change. Anybody with that mentality and good decision-making can thrive. If you don’t have that, you die. That’s true in any industry, any business.

One of the biggest challenges that the media has today is that there’s a high amount of news fatigue, particularly in politics. Does that fatigue concern you? And do you ever think ‘we need to change the way that we cover the news’ because of that fatigue?

I didn’t really agree with the fatigue thing. Like, fatigue? Sure. Like if I go for a long run, at the end of it, I’m fatigued. That doesn’t mean I don’t go for a run the next day. People are fatigued because we just went through an insane news cycle where crazy stuff was happening day after day. It’s natural to be a little fatigued. In fact, I would recommend to people — take a breather, man. There’s a beautiful world out there. Go fishing, go for a hike, go hang out with your kids. Go be normal. There’s plenty of room to be normal. Shut your damn phone off. I want you reading Axios, but we make it pretty quick and easy. Just read us, then go have fun. Go enjoy the world. And I don’t see it in the traffic — people are as interested in this stuff as ever before. It ebbs and flows, and it always will. But you can’t run a business sitting here trying to think about the emotional psyche of the American people and then try to adjust accordingly. You just have to produce a product that people consider essential, trustworthy, and vital. Then we’re fine.