The primaries were a dud. The general election is a rematch between two well-known candidates unlikely to surprise in a major way. These circumstances have many news organizations anxious about how to keep their audiences engaged this cycle. Alex Burns, though, sees the race as right in Politico’s wheelhouse.

“Nothing focuses the mind quite like a presidential campaign,” says Burns, Politico’s head of news. And the 2024 contest presents an opportunity to “tell a story about the country and the world, anchored in geographies where Politico is very strong,” he notes.

The 37-year-old journalist is steeped in Politico’s ambitions, having started his career in the Arlington, Virginia, newsroom in the summer of 2008, a week after graduating from Harvard, as a researcher for cofounders John Harris and Jim VandeHei. Burns was there for Politico’s rise from start-up to establishment player, covering the 2012 presidential race alongside Maggie Haberman, with both departing for The New York Times in 2015. Seven years later, Burns returned, rejoining Politico, officially, as associate global politics editor and a columnist. But “it was always understood by me that we were going to get him looped in somehow to publication leadership,” Harris tells me.

Burns is part of a new leadership team with a mandate to ratchet up the intensity and scope of Politico’s journalism, which Harris felt had lost its edge. Launched in 2007, and led by two Washington Post alums, Harris and VandeHei, Politico quickly dominated the insider political conversation and later created the policy-focused Politico Pro, a successful subscription service that has continued to drive the brand’s business. (Last year the company’s global revenue was approximately $250 million—more than half of which came from Pro.) In 2021, Axel Springer, the German publishing giant, purchased Politico for more than a billion dollars. As part of the deal, Politico’s European operation, which previously functioned as a separate sister company, merged with the American arm. New CEO Goli Sheikholeslami, who has a goal of doubling total revenue by 2028, is overseeing the transition into a single global company.

While the media business has been in a state of tumult—with industry-watchers even talking about “extinction-level” conditions—Politico’s business model looks comparatively solid. The challenge Politico faces today is one of identity, amid stepped-up competition in Washington and shifting editorial priorities. In its fifth election cycle, Politico is battling onetime colleagues turned rivals for scoops on its traditional turf while trying to fulfill a more global mandate. “When we were in Iowa for the Iowa caucus, they were sending out emails about how they were in Davos,” a former Politico editor, now at another major news outlet, notes.

Out of concerns that Politico is losing its edge, the untested leadership team is pushing staffers harder. Some journalists see it as the sharpening and discipline Politico has been lacking; others, as micromanagement bogging down a newsroom built on speed. “We’re having an incredible DNA change with no guarantee that it’ll work,” says one staffer. “There’s no clear vision for what they want from us, and it sort of changes day to day,” says another. “People feel really demoralized and frustrated.”

Burns has particularly rubbed people the wrong way with his demanding, sometimes brusque manner. He acknowledges there has been a learning curve in going from reporter-columnist to senior manager. But “the standard that I am measured against in my job is how interesting and incisive our report is, and that has not felt like a particularly new experience for me,” he says. In fact, he adds: “It feels like something I’ve been preparing my whole career to do.”

Early last year, watching Politico from the sidelines, Harris wasn’t particularly impressed. He noticed “a more utilitarian approach to coverage” on the site, he says, and “a lot of stuff that would’ve been equally at home in other news organizations. We’ve got to keep that distinctive sense of place.”

Harris stepped back from daily leadership and into an advisory role in 2019, with then owner Robert Allbritton appointing Matthew Kaminski, Politico’s global editor, to take his place as the top US editor. But he never went far, staying involved in conversations at the highest levels of the company. So when he raised his complaints, people listened. “Anything that carries a whiff of complacency, it really frightens me,” Harris tells me, “because I know how vulnerable institutions can be if they’re not always in a kind of a forward lean.” He didn’t exactly hide his dissatisfaction: “He told people that in the Kaminski era, too much of the journalism resembled buffet food—very undistinguished,” says a former Politico staffer.

One of Harris’s critiques pertained to Politico’s congressional franchise. Harris thought publication leadership “had not responded with sufficient attentiveness and competitiveness” to new players on the Hill, referring especially to Punchbowl News, the Congress-focused start-up founded by three Politico veterans: former “Playbook” coauthors Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, as well as former Capitol Hill bureau chief John Bresnahan. “There are likely zero people who know of Punchbowl or Roll Call but don’t know of Politico, and there are tens of millions who depend on our content who don’t know of and don’t read the others and never will,” Harris says.

“We are happy to compete and win in the narrow arena—what are people on Capitol Hill talking about?—but we also have far wider ambitions,” Harris adds, touting the brand’s mission to reach audiences globally. Closer to home, Politico launched a Congress live blog, seemingly to keep up with Punchbowl. Harris says the company is “seeing the audience for Capitol Hill stories and our Congress-focused newsletter and live blogs soaring.” (Even before Punchbowl, Politico already faced competition from Axios, which was launched in 2017 by VandeHei, “Playbook” originator Mike Allen, and former Politico chief revenue officer Roy Schwartz.)

“When we started Politico years ago, we were very conscious of creating something new—something the market hadn’t even recognized it needed yet,” Harris adds. “I think competitors on Capitol Hill or elsewhere who come into the market essentially trying to replicate what we do, or what other founders did while they were here, make a critical error. You can win short-term success with the novelty of being new, but you can already see the long-term hazard of trying to compete without original ideas.”

Under new ownership, Politico needed “a leadership team in place” that could “realize the potential of bringing these two companies together,” says Sheikholeslami, who agreed, along with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, that a change was in order. “I was not actually expecting John to raise his hand and say that he wanted to get back into the managerial role,” she admits. Döpfner, for his part, “didn’t want me to come back in a caretaker role,” says Harris. “He felt strongly that if I was going to come back, the way to be effective was to make clear that I’m back in leadership in a new role and new capacity, and here for the indefinite future.” Long enough, says Harris, to “accomplish an agenda—and I have one.”

So Harris mounted a return last year as Politico’s first “global editor in chief,” which put him in charge of Politico’s newsrooms in both the US and Europe. Then he reorganized newsroom leadership, promoting Joe Schatz to executive editor, installing Burns as head of news, and elevating Francesca Barber, the executive director of global newsroom strategy. A few weeks later, Schatz announced that Anita Kumar, a White House correspondent turned standards editor, would be promoted to senior managing editor, working closely with Burns and Schatz. The triad—as Schatz, Kumar, and Burns are referred to internally—was born.

Since the leadership transition, Harris et al. have made some new hires and promotions. But the biggest change staffers have felt under the new regime is more aggressive oversight of copy. An afternoon meeting known as the “impact” meeting, in which a select group of editors goes through the top section of every major story, has become a particular point of contention. Sources say stories now come back noticeably different—so much so that some call Burns “the rewrite man,” I’m told—and that, with several section heads and policy team editors now shut out of the process, they feel a breakdown in communication.

The point of the impact meeting is “to unapologetically lift up the coverage from good to great,” says Schatz. “There are differences of opinion on the best way to get a story into that shape, and we wouldn’t be doing our job if there wasn’t.” Burns acknowledges that there is “definitely room” for more communication and that he can, to some degree, sympathize. “Look, I’ve been a reporter under a change in management too, and I totally appreciate the skepticism or anxiety or frustration that people have in that situation,” he tells me. But “there is a clear mandate for this newsroom leadership team to sharpen, strengthen, and increase the impact and ambition of our work,” and his role is to apply that on a daily basis. “I’m not surprised that there are people in the newsroom who experience that as a more intrusive editing process than they have faced in the past. I also think it’s a more supportive editorial process,” he says. “The work is better.”

Perhaps. But “you can’t ‘win the day,’” one staffer says, referring to the philosophy that governed Politico’s early years, “if you haven’t won the newsroom.” Burns came into the job without prior upper-level management experience, and it showed, sources said, citing instances in which he flashed his frustration during meetings or was undiplomatic in responding to others’ ideas. “It’s getting better, but it started from a really bad place,” a second staffer says.

Newsroom insiders say Burns is smart and generally has good news instincts, and that he’s improving things at the margins, like headlines and front-page liveliness. Breaking news stories, though, have been a source of frustration, as staffers sense a disconnect between the desire for authoritative takes and reactivity to sometimes minor news updates. “He can’t see the reverberations of his ideas or how much planning they would involve,” a third staffer says. “He doesn’t understand all the pieces required to operate a newsroom.”

“We are pushing for more authoritative and more urgent coverage,” says Schatz. “I don’t see those two things as being at odds.” The push is “totally a group effort,” he adds. “We’re well aware of the daily muscles you have to exercise to make these things happen.”

A broader problem seems to stem from uncertainty around the editorial chain of command. Burns is not the top editor, but—perhaps because he has the imprimatur of Harris, or because he has pissed the most people off in the shortest amount of time, or a combination of the two—he is seen as the one calling the shots. Politico is a place, a second former staffer tells me, “that makes up its org chart as it goes. That has been a problem in the past and continues to be.” They add: “At the same time, its freshness, in the sense of reinvention, is something that distinguishes it in a good way from the Times or the Post.”

“Politico doesn’t have a history of editors coming in and winning the newsroom and having bouquets thrown at them,” says Peter Canellos, Politico’s managing editor of enterprise coverage. “The structure at Politico, with all the different verticals and business models, means you have a lot of people rowing in a lot of different directions. There are a lot of different centers of power. So it’s hard for anyone to come in and win everyone’s trust and have people rally around them.”

Sources say things have gotten particularly tense between Sam Stein, deputy managing editor for politics, and Burns. Stein’s deputy, Eun Kim, had effectively been serving as White House editor since Stein’s promotion in 2022. Months ago, I’m told, she asked for the formal title—technically, she was still deputy White House editor—but management punted on the decision. Kim left Politico this month for a job outside of the journalism industry. It is not clear who will assume her role. (Schatz notes that Stein remains very involved in Politico’s White House coverage. Politico is “in the midst of positioning people as we speak,” he says. “We’re not going to miss a beat on the White House.”)

The loss of a top White House editor seven months before an election is only bolstering concerns in the newsroom about Politico’s strategy this cycle. Leaders, on the other hand, are already thinking about how they will be remembered for it, with Harris hoping the year will be “a defining moment for the publication.” He and his team tried to convince editorial and business-side staffers as to why on an afternoon in early January, in a conference room with sweeping views of the Potomac.

A week out from Iowa, the quartet—Harris, Burns, Schatz, and Barber—argued that Politico was particularly well suited to cover this election cycle. The newsroom, they stressed, should lean into the full range of resources at its disposal and turn to its journalists steeped in politics, policy, and the law, especially since Donald Trump could spend as much time in the courtroom as on the campaign trail. (Politico has excelled on the legal front, winning a Polk Award last year for both its historic scoop on a draft Supreme Court opinion ending the constitutional right to abortion and its sustained coverage of the High Court following it.) Staffers, they said, should also leverage Politico’s presence in New York and California, two states that could tip control of the House, and tap into Politico’s European newsroom to bring in a global perspective. “The structure of this campaign has come to us,” Burns told the room.

In their presentation, they highlighted stories that captured the stakes of the race by melding policy with politics, from one piece covering the implications of a Trump victory for the crypto industry to another on the politics of nuclear power in California. More recently, the newsroom combined forces in a sprawling look at possible policy changes—each explained by a different reporter—in a second Trump term. Another striking moment under the new regime came the day after the State of the Union, when the site led with a reported column, by senior foreign affairs correspondent Nahal Toosi, that interpreted the political event chiefly through Biden’s handling of foreign policy issues.

Sheikholeslami says the company will continue to invest in “vital organs” like Washington and Brussels, while also expanding to new states in the US and building out larger newsrooms in London, Paris, and Berlin. Still, she says, the formula remains the same: “We only do politics and policy. We’ve not been distracted by other shiny objects.”

Harris believes a more global scope squares with Politico’s traditional strengths. “The future of the Ukraine war—that wouldn’t have been something Politico ever had any kind of claim on public attention for, in previous versions of ourselves,” he says. “Have we moved away from politics and now we’re covering global conflict? No. The global conflict is the political story,” he continues, adding, “We’re not trying to become a transatlantic think tank or something like that.”

“Scoops and micro-scoops, always love ’em—they’re always going to be part of what we do,” says Harris. But now, he says, he wants people “to come to Politico for something more.”

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Robert Allbritton, not John Harris, appointed Matthew Kaminski as top US editor.