The US political news site Politico will establish an Australian outlet later this year, bringing its brand of insider politics and policy news to the Canberra press gallery.
Ryan Heath, an Australian journalist who launched Politico’s Brussels Playbook a decade ago, is the edition’s launch editor. A newsletter covering federal parliamentary politics and policy, Canberra Playbook, will launch when parliament returns from a winter break.
“Australians need journalism that both explains power dynamics and connects the dots globally,” Heath said.
“In this era of great power and technology upheavals, Politico’s ability to examine Australia’s most important security and trade relationships is unrivaled. We take politicians and policy seriously – it’s all we do. We will bring that depth and new angles to political journalism in Canberra, just as we have everywhere else we operate.”
The Canberra bureau will link Politico readers in North America and Europe to Australian politics and help readers understand geopolitical developments in the Indo-Pacific, said Politico’s chief executive, Goli Sheikholeslami.
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“This investment in a third continent underscores how Politico enters its third decade as a strong, successful, and growing news organisation, committed to linking international power centres and illuminating politics, power, and policy on a global scale.”
Launched in Washington in 2007, Politico has built a profitable business model based on offering both free and subscription content produced by 350 journalists in Washington, Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin, Sacramento and New York.
Heath, who is returning to Australia to set up the bureau, said “Canberra is unmistakably a Politico town”.
“It has the planet’s densest diplomatic community, and is a city purpose-built for power and policy,” he said on LinkedIn. “Canberra is also a geopolitical capital, a connector between East and West.”
Heath indicated the new outlet would not be too ambitious and would start small: “We’re not going to bite off more than we can chew.”
Owned by Axel Springer, the proprietor of Business Insider and Europe’s highest-circulation newspaper Bild, Politico has considered opening in Australia several times over the years but the venture has not come to fruition until now.
Australia has seen several international media brands open bureaus in the past decade and a half only to fold years later, including BuzzFeed Australia, Huffington Post, Vice, Business Insider Australia and the New York Times.
BuzzFeed Australia launched in Sydney in 2014, hiring about 40 editorial and commercial staff, but was closed in 2020.
The New York Times has an Australia correspondent based in Sydney but closed its bureau in Bondi in 2024 and stopped publishing the Australia letter produced by the bureau in the same year. Business Insider Australia launched in 2013 and folded operations in 2022.
Guardian Australia, Daily Mail Australia and BBC have built successful Australian operations since opening. Guardian Australia was the fourth most read news site in the country in January while Daily Mail was seventh and BBC was 10th, according to the latest Ipsos report.
