Inside Politico’s Billion-Dollar Drama

From “son of” to mogul in his own right: Robert Allbritton just became the unlikeliest winner of the new media sweepstakes.

I was sitting in a bar next to John Harris, a former national editor of The Washington Post. It was late in 2006, and he was recruiting me for a new project, a superblog called The Politico. I was interested, but I had a few questions about the owner. I had never heard of Robert Allbritton and I asked if he’d be the kind of billionaire publisher who wanted to see his own column on the front page, or if he’d be the other kind of wealthy owner, a dilettante who gets quickly bored with his new plaything. Mr. Harris answered my question in cryptic Washington-speak: “He went to Wesleyan.” And it seemed to me that his mention of the freethinking liberal arts college in Connecticut meant something like: “He’s mostly harmless.” Mr. Allbritton turned out to be a bit more than that. The Washington heir, whose Georgetown existence and mild affect put him at a considerable distance from the larger-than-life characters in the red-hot center of digital media, has scored the kind of deal his counterparts in New York and Los Angeles only dream about: a billion-dollar sale.