News & Politics

Newsletter Fight! How Politico’s Playbook Stacks up Against Axios AM

Playbook has 258 birthday shoutouts. Axios AM has none.

Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer. (Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey/courtesy Politico).

Each morning, in-boxes across town ping with a pair of e-mail newsletters: Playbook, written by three Politico journalists, and Axios AM, by Mike Allen (who originally created Playbook). Because we’re hypercompetitive inside-the-Beltway types, we figured we’d compare a single week’s worth of the digests.

[su_table]

Playbook

Axios AM

Word Count

21,238 10,733

Sharpest Take

How Stormy Daniels has topped the President at his own media-management game. How the Facebook data breach may lead lawmakers to look into privacy regulations for social-media giants.

References to Trump

148 90

 Number of Ellipses

423 95

Random Tidbit

Trump backer Robert Mercer has donated money to freeze stockpiles of human urine in the Oregon mountains. A website called Weedmaps lists different local distributors.

Number of birthday shout-outs

258 0

[/su_table]

This article appeared in the May 2018 issue of Washingtonian.

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Mimi Montgomery Washingtonian
Home & Features Editor

Mimi Montgomery joined Washingtonian in 2018. She’s written for The Washington Post, Garden & Gun, Outside Magazine, Washington City Paper, DCist, and PoPVille. Originally from North Carolina, she now lives in Del Ray.