That day, Harris and VandeHei moved to their new offices in the Allbritton Communications skyscraper in Arlington, Virginia, to start building their publication. Harris would be editor in chief; VandeHei would be executive editor. They intended to keep the small staff Tolchin had already assembled for Capitol Leader to write stories for the 24-page newspaper they had to fill. But their top priority was the website, which they expected to be an almost entirely separate product staffed by celebrated political journalists whose work they could showcase. The President’s 2007 State of the Union address—their planned start date for both the newspaper and the website—was slated for January 23, 2007. That gave the two of them about two months to recruit top reporters and oversee the construction of their site.

Allbritton Communications Chief Technology Officer Ryan Mannion had been developing a simple website for the Capitol Leader in addition to overseeing the websites of Allbritton’s eight television stations. But Harris and VandeHei did not intend simply to republish content from the newspaper on the website. They would, in fact, focus on producing Web content first. The newspaper, which would circulate only in DC, did not have the site’s potential for a nationwide audience, and VandeHei and Harris felt that filling the newspaper’s pages should come after building and filling the website. VandeHei later said:

Most media companies will say, "Yes, we’re multimedia, we’ve got a newspaper and we've got a website," but most are built around the newspaper… They’ve got a newspaper; they've dumped the newspaper online. We’re trying to build it from the other way. [1]

Harris and VandeHei wanted the website to feature blogs by prominent journalists, video, and space for readers to comment on articles. Mannion recalls: “Originally [the Capitol Leader’ s website] was supposed to be just a ninth website that I managed, and that quickly got out of hand. So I surrendered my other duties and went full time to [the Capitol Leader ].” [2]

As the sole programmer on the project, Mannion had two major tasks to accomplish in a short period of time. He had to design the site that readers would see. But perhaps more importantly, Mannion had to build a content management system, or CMS, that would allow the site’s writers to post their content to the Web quickly and also permit editors to make changes, corrections or improvements. It would have to be easy to use, and it needed the capability to handle video, photography, and interactive elements. Mannion decided against buying ready-made content management software. He says:

When you’re buying [software]… the evaluation period can be several weeks to several months, and we just didn’t have the time… I knew that I could write it from scratch.

He knew this would be labor-intensive in the short term, but would make it easier to change the programming code and add or subtract components later. Mannion also told VandeHei and Harris that there was no way to produce a flawless website in the time he had. His priority was to give them a simple way to put their journalism on the Web by January 23. The three agreed that, in Mannion’s words, he could “add bells and whistles as time permitted.”

While Mannion built the site through November and December, often spending 18-hour days at work, VandeHei and Harris were also spending punishing hours in the office, focused on persuading top reporters to join them. They faced several early disappointments. A week after they joined Allbritton Communications, VandeHei’s friend Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post told them he had decided to stay at the newspaper. Hotline ’s Chuck Todd, whom they had also hoped to recruit, accepted a job as a correspondent for NBC television. Time ’s Mike Allen had given VandeHei personal assurances that he would join their publication, but Harris was pessimistic that he would. Time was trying aggressively to keep him, and he had given neither outlet a firm commitment yet.

But there was good news as well. On December 8, VandeHei and Harris hired Kim Kingsley from the Washington Post . Kingsley had worked at the Post for two years, and her chief job was arranging television and radio appearances for Post reporters. Harris and VandeHei hoped that the exposure Kingsley could gain for their own reporters would help establish their publication as a destination for political news. On December 11, John Bresnahan, an associate editor at Roll Call , agreed to join them as Congress bureau chief. Finally, on December 13, to VandeHei and Harris’ relief, Mike Allen formally agreed to join them as well, as chief political correspondent. He would in addition write his own White House column for Time. At the same time, Harris and VandeHei, in consultation with Allbritton, abandoned the name Capitol Leader and settled on a new one for their website and newspaper: the Politico.

The high-profile departures from established news outlets attracted a great deal of attention and press coverage. Harris and VandeHei took the opportunity to explain the Politico to as many different publications as they could, including the Washington Post , the New York Times , the Washingtonian , and the Washington DC media website FishbowlDC. VandeHei says:

Right then people were starting to lose their jobs [in the media]. There was all this doom and gloom stuff, and then Jim [VandeHei] and John [Harris] leave [the Washington Post ]. So instantly, everybody wants to write about it. And we just exploited the hell out of that.

By early January 2007, Harris and VandeHei had built a small staff of experienced reporters for their website. Those reporters pursued their stories mostly on their own as Harris and VandeHei concentrated on hiring and what VandeHei called “putting out fires”—trying to help Mannion correct the website’s technical problems while making what seemed like endless design and layout corrections, both for the website and the newspaper. Harris and VandeHei were growing worried as their launch date approached. They had never managed, let alone designed, a Web publication before—nor had their original plan accounted for the additional headaches of putting out a paper publication. VandeHei recalls the frustration he felt looking at mockups of the newspaper design:

We wanted to start like a cool website, and we’re spending all our time [on the newspaper, messing] around with like, wait, can you have adjacent headlines and a photo that’s looking off the page?... It was like putting out a college newspaper.

Moreover, the content side, which VandeHei and Harris thought they understood better than Web development and newspaper production, was also proving complicated. As January began and they started to turn their attention to reading and polishing the Web content their new hires had written, they realized that they had neglected to consider the proper number of editors and copy editors required to support their reporters. Now it was a process of trial and error. They were learning, VandeHei says:

There’s a whole process… for getting a story from, someone writes it. It has to go through an editor. Well, if that editor is not good, well, you’re screwed. If the copy editor who’s backing up the editor isn’t good, you’re screwed. If… the copy editor’s version can’t get into the newspaper, because someone at the production desk isn’t good, then you’re screwed. And if you don’t have a Web producer who can take stuff… and put it on the Web and actually dress it up with a picture and roll a video, you have sort of a clunky looking website. So we had cancer throughout the entire system.

Two days before the website launch and publication of the first edition of the newspaper, Harris and VandeHei realized they had not yet actually read the copy for the stories intended for the newspaper’s inaugural edition. They had to make time to go over the paper version of the Politico . The reporters Tolchin had hired had been working on their stories for months with virtually no leadership as Tolchin focused on guiding the startup process. VandeHei reassured Harris that they could use these stories to fill the back of the newspaper, and that they themselves could write stories for the front page.

On Sunday, January 21, they sat in Harris’ office to go over the material that would fill the newspaper. As they started leafing through staff contributions, recalls VandeHei, “Harris’ face started to turn stark white. I’d never seen him more serious.” They knew that the newspaper staff was younger and less experienced than their Web staff, but had not fully appreciated the implications until now. “We had these people who were at the top of the Washington Post [combined] with people who were going to be entry level at The Hill newspaper,” says VandeHei. “Most of [the stories were] completely unusable.” As Harris and VandeHei regarded each other silently, each wondered how to salvage their product in the two days they had left until launch. More profoundly, perhaps this whole enterprise had been a bad idea.