American news site Axios is being sold for $525 million to Cox Enterprises, a major industrial conglomerate active in media, communications and automobiles. The three founders of Axios will be financially incentivized to remain with the company and will continue to be decision makers in the work of the newspaper and the company’s business.
Axios (Greek means “worthy”, “of value”) was one of the most successful news stories in the media world of the last decade: it was founded in 2016 by three former Politico journalists and immediately gained a certain notoriety from the journalists who worked on it, for his ambitions and for his unparalleled approach to issues such as politics, media, health and technology (which he has been most concerned with from the start). Jim VandeHei, one of the three founders, said the goal is to make Axios “a hybrid between the Economist and Twitter”: In fact, the newsfeed on the front page is designed similar to a social network, with scrolling vertically and a “post” at once.
Over the years, Axios has launched several innovative projects in the media, particularly in the area of newsletters and local information, at a time when hundreds of local newspapers in the United States were shutting down and investment in the sector continued to decline. In this sense, the acquisition should guarantee great economic stability to a sector struggling due to the decline in online advertising revenues, dominated by large companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. Regarding Axios, Sara Fischer wrote that the site’s investment in local information played a key role in the acquisition, as it was one of Cox Enterprises’ early investment areas, which it still intends to nurture and maintain.
Also the format of his articles has often been addressed, which is structured schematically as a kind of concept map, with the aim of helping the reader to fully understand the subject in the shortest possible time (to understand how it is done just open the link at the beginning of this article). A bit like Politico, he built his initial fame by focusing heavily on smaller rounds and that the big traditional newspapers considered them insignificant. In politics, Donald Trump’s combative approach stood out during the years of Donald Trump’s presidency, particularly in interviews with his political journalist Jonathan Swan.