By JAYDEN KHATIB
Axios takes a unique approach to journalism. In the six years that it’s existed, the media company has leveraged a distinct, brief style of conveying information and highly successful newsletter offerings, among other elements, to become one of the internet’s most read digital-native news websites.
Within the greater news media landscape, Axios, a news site that former Politico journalists Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz founded in 2016, may be best known for its SmartBrevity style. On its headquarters’ website, Axios describes SmartBrevity as writing that “prioritize[s] essential news, explain[s] its impact on readers, and deliver[s] both in a concise and visual format.”
This style makes writing at Axios very different from writing at other news outlets, as Chelsea Cirruzzo, an Axios health and DC reporter who previously reported on public health at the U.S. News & World Report, explained.
“I think the biggest change that I found is, I have to really think about not overdoing reporting… Usually, I’d talk with as many people as possible and then have hours and hours of interviews to pursue, and I'm overwhelmed,” said Cirruzzo. “You have to trust yourself a bit and be like, ‘Okay, I trust that these three or four people, I can write something based off of that, which is usually like totally fine.’”
The SmartBrevity philosophy extends beyond writing. Looking through Axios’s data visualizations, their shared sleek, streamlined style jumps out. Data visualization reporter Simran Parwani explained that this is no accident.
“We really try to follow the SmartBrevity philosophy in the greater newsroom. And so being really streamlined to really get at the core of the message for the reader is important,” said Parwani. “We're not going to do a bar chart with like, 15 bars. It'll be mostly capped out at like eight to 10. Or we're not going into, really, really long tables.”
Parwani also explained that part of the SmartBrevity philosophy for the data visualization desk involves deciding when a data visualization is even necessary. She often recommends against including data visualizations in stories where the data could fit in one of the site’s trademark bullet points to avoid giving readers more material than they need.
Some of Axios’s most popular offerings are its newsletters. In a 2018 Medium article, Ranjan Roy of the Edge Group, a consultancy firm that helps companies improve their email marketing and newsletter output, analyzes over 1,000 Axios newsletters to find out what makes them work.
One of Roy's key findings was that Axios articles tend to be very short, averaging around 1,500 words. Ciruzzo, who writes the daily local DC newsletter, agrees that the outlet’s willingness to put out brief, scannable newsletters is part of why their newsletters are so successful.
Cirruzzo explained that she’s heard from readers that people who are usually too stressed out to read very much find it easy to keep up with Axios’s newsletters because of their brevity and their often personality-driven nature. Most of Axios’s newsletters are written by the same writers every week, and readers often follow these journalists on Twitter and are somewhat attached to them as personalities.
The Edge Group also found that the newsletters featured frequent usage of bold text, which aligns with the outlet's overall SmartBrevity style.
Click below to listen to the interviews.