Someone Is Trolling Politico by Redirecting Its New Product

On Monday, Adweek received a tip that a new Politico initiative, Congress Minutes, has been the subject of a mysterious act of cyber sabotage. The mobile-first news product, which launched Monday, is written by reporter Anthony Adragna and promises to cover the “latest exclusives, twists and analysis from Congress in real time.” However, if in the process of searching for Congress Minutes you typed the words “congressminutes.com” into your browser, you would be directed not to the Politico offering, but to the homepage of a rival publisher, Punchbowl News. (Go ahead and try it––if you can stomach politics, the link is entirely SFW.) How This Capsule Newsletter From Politico Graduated to Its Permanent Roster Punchbowl News, which launched to much fanfare in January, is a joint venture spearheaded by two Politico alumni, Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer. At the time, news of their departure had aroused suspicions of internal friction. Sources told Maxwell Tani of The Daily Beast that the two, who had written the influential Politico Playbook newsletter since 2016, split from their employer in part because of newsroom conflict. So when the eponymous domain for a new Politico product redirected to the landing page of Punchbowl News, the likely culprit seemed at hand. However, when reached for comment by Adweek, Palmer denied that Punchbowl owned the URL. "Punchbowl News does not own the URL," she said via email. Politico first announced that it would be launching Congress Minutes in a memo on Aug. 24 and featured the news in Playbook later that morning, a spokesperson confirmed. According to GoDaddy.com, where the link is hosted, the domain was purchased on Aug. 24. The owner of the domain is private. Adweek reached out to Palmer to confirm whether an employee of Punchbowl News owns the domain, but has not received a response. The saga of Politico and Punchbowl In January, when Sherman and Palmer announced their new venture, the news made waves for a number of reasons, but its most delicious plotline was the dash of palace intrigue that peppered the departure. Sherman and Palmer had been tapped to run Politico Playbook in 2016 after Politico founder Mike Allen, who had helmed the newsletter since 2007, left the publication to start a rival operation, Axios. Luckily for the Beltway Bible, Sherman and Palmer soon proved they were up to the task. According to The Daily Beast, under the stewardship of Sherman and Palmer the newsletter tripled its subscribers, doubled revenue and developed a firm identity. So when the duo announced in January, at the peak of perhaps the most fraught moment in modern American politics, that they were leaving Politico to strike out on their own, questions of motive quickly reared their heads. According to Tani, a rift had grown between Sherman and Palmer and the rest of the newsroom. The duo had apparently grown so comfortable in the limelight that they had begun to outshine their colleagues. The New York Times’ Ben Smith, on the other hand, appraised the situation differently. “The Playbook authors’ departure was, even by the relatively dull standards of Washington newsroom drama, sedate,” he wrote back in January. However, because media reporting abhors a vacuum, the subject of the true state of relations between the outgoing Punchbowl team and the Politico newsroom remained a point of debate. Reasons for suspicion Despite the denial from Sherman, the cybersquatting fits the Punchbowl profile perfectly: They definitely have the motive, and the redirection to their homepage is certainly incriminating. Plus, the near-invisibility of the ploy suggests that the prank is meant to act more as a gadfly, rather than a bout of corporate espionage. Nowadays, hardly anyone would physically type in the URL of a website they want to visit, meaning next to no one would ever encounter the dummy website. And if you simply google “Congress Minutes,” all the top options direct you to the correct domain. Even fewer people still would assume that the name of the product itself would serve as its domain. After all, if you wanted to read The New York Times’ newsletter The Daily, you would hardly think “TheDaily.com” would be its home. No, in all likelihood, very few people would ever even discover that such a prank had been played. That is, no one except the people it would bug the most. Such a subtle slight would only be discernible to the people in charge of setting up the website, masterminding its launch, perfecting its SEO and making sure every hyperlink leads in the right direction. In other words, the intended targets of the troll and the only people who would notice it would be one and the same: the architects of Congress Minutes themselves. In that sense, it would appear to be a nearly perfect bit of digital mischief: entirely harmless, almost completely invisible and yet excruciating to its victims in its pettiness.

Publishing News

Someone Is Trolling Politico by Redirecting Its New Product to a Rival Website

Punchbowl News has denied that it is behind the cybersquatting

Mark Stenberg

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Mark Stenberg