When Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz founded Axios, in 2017, its animating idea was that powerful people want to know what’s happening, but they don’t want to spend fifteen minutes reading about it. Axios’s e-mail newsletters would be all about bullet points, six-word headlines, and stories that fit on a phone screen. The site went live that January with a Donald Trump interview broken up in multiple posts—“Funny moment,” one of them flatly intoned—and the launch party, attended by the then former Vice-President Joe Biden and the Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway alike, featured hologram-esque projections of Allen tending bar. The message? Axios was the wave of the future.
Origen: The Dubious Wisdom of “Smart Brevity” | The New Yorker
