It just launched last week, but Axios has a way of getting into one’s routine of morning briefings, or at least it’s working its way into mine.
You may ask: another e-mail newsletter? Who needs it? You are right. I personally already get the New York Times, Quartz (in English and Spanish), MyFT from the Financial Times, and the California Essentials from The Los Angeles Times. So, why add Axios?
Axios is the new media venture from Politico’s co-founders,and I must say that it sets itself apart from the rest in three essential ways:
— The content is primarily in the areas of business, healthcare, and technology (with politics and media mixed into all three topics).
— Axios handles stories in a way that satisfies the two tempos of leaning forward and leaning back. In many cases, I am satisfied with the summarized version of the story, but the option is always there to click and read the entire story. Axios even reminds you of how many words are in the entire story before you take the plunge.
— Axios is very mobile-focused platform where every item is summarized in a screen, the size of your iPhone screen. The way the summaries are written, they immediately convey the importance of the story and why we should read it. In fact, the way Axios writes its reports is very much what we have seen in our previous blog posts of the past few days about WED, the fusion of writing/editing/design, and where linear thinking prevails. Notice the subheads that help with internal navigation of the article.
Axios includes sponsored content, such as this report about Boeing and the future of aviation.
There are also sponsors referred to as “launch partners”:
In the words of Axios chairman and CEO Jim VandeHei in interview with Nieman Lab:
“Rule number one is we don’t ever want to dumb it (content) down. Rule number two is we want to make sure that you have to understand that a smart serious news consumer on Snapchat consumes differently on Axios.com. On Snapchat it has to be short, graphical, video heavy — but doesn’t have to be dumb. You can keep it smart but still get a big audience.”