The New York Times reports that NOTUS, the political news site, kind of like a junior Politico, and in fact started by Politico's founder, plans to add more general news, and also sports, in June under an expansion.
From what I found before the paywall dropped:
NOTUS, a Washington political news website with ambitious plans to fill a void it says was left by deep cuts at The Washington Post, will be renamed The Star and relaunch in the first week of June, the editor in chief, Tim Grieve, said on Thursday.
NOTUS started in 2023 as a publication tied to the Allbritton Journalism Institute, a nonprofit that trains young political journalists. Its name stands for News of the United States, a play on the nickname for the President of the United States. It was created with a $20 million grant from Robert Allbritton, the billionaire co-founder of Politico.
Yes, the Post had some kewl sportswriters, but sports is a mug's game. Newspapers of any size have ditched high school and even college sports reporting long ago. The nearest newspaper to me of any size, the Denton Wrecked Chronic, does basically nothing on University of North Texas coverage, and did fairly little pre-COVID. In a high school football preview, with Denton itself having two large high schools and the county several smaller ones, they had a 12-page broadsheet one post-COVID year, in which ads must have been sold as a package. Some car dealer had a 6x2 or something like that, bottom strip ad on every page but the cover.
My pair of weeklies, in conjunction with one other? Still does a 48-page, tab, so 24-page broadsheet equivalent, football preview every year that runs about 40 percent ads.
That said, the Slimes is a month behind the curve. Semafor covered this in mid-March. So, too, did Nieman Lab, which noted that Albritton backed the flop TBD, which tried to cover DC suburbs several years ago. Nieman also reminds us that dad Joe
Albritton himself is a media mogul with a less-than-saintly earlier life history. Expanding NOTUS, even more than the founding of Politico, may be a move at greenwashing. Open Secrets has no campaign donation information on him; it does note his dad, Joe, gave money to Texas ConservaDem Ken Bentsen, GOP Congresscritter Mike Schneider, who doesn't even have a Wiki page, and twice to the RNC.
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