Politico didn’t make payroll a couple of days ago for some technical reason or another. But because the timing coincided with Musk and his minions invading USAID conspiracy theories immediately popped up: Politico is bankrolled by USAID! It’s a psyop!
Of course the reality is incredibly boring. Politico sells PoliticoPro[1], “public affairs software”. The government (not USAID) was paying for that. Was it a good purchase? Are we getting value for money for it? No clue, but I’d bet the people that terminated the subscriptions don’t have a clue either. The hoarde demanded immediate action so action was taken.
My bet is they’ll quietly resubscribe in a few months.
Without seeing the value delivered for the service, it seems kind of pricey at first blush unless it was paying for multiple individual analysts for N accounts to give them credible, researched expertise as a service. Maybe they were paying for a zillion individual subscriptions? If so, perhaps a site license for $1-2 million would be more reasonable. Don't just throw things a way because the number is higher than X.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 74.6 ms ] threadCongress decides on budgets in an democracy. But not in an idiocracy.
btw, both d and r teams are idiotic.
So lobbyists, consultants, and NGOs can still get access to the PR tool - just not the policymakers themselves.
Politico didn’t make payroll a couple of days ago for some technical reason or another. But because the timing coincided with Musk and his minions invading USAID conspiracy theories immediately popped up: Politico is bankrolled by USAID! It’s a psyop!
Of course the reality is incredibly boring. Politico sells PoliticoPro[1], “public affairs software”. The government (not USAID) was paying for that. Was it a good purchase? Are we getting value for money for it? No clue, but I’d bet the people that terminated the subscriptions don’t have a clue either. The hoarde demanded immediate action so action was taken.
My bet is they’ll quietly resubscribe in a few months.
[1] https://www.politicopro.com/
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/politico...
> USAID paid $44K to Politico, not over $8M as White House claimed. It was for subscriptions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977622