PoliticsNow, a leading political Web site that was a magnet for campaign news during the 1996 election season, closed Tuesday.
Citing the "changing nature of the Web," the site's three old-media sponsors - ABC News, The Washington Post Company, and the National Journal - said they had agreed to rechannel resources into their individual Web sites.
"PoliticsNow fulfilled the special needs of an election year with journalistic skill and a unique sense of style," Marc Teren, president of Digital Ink, the new-media subsidiary of The Washington Post Company, said in a statement posted on the PoliticsNow site. "We will now concentrate our political coverage on washingtonpost.com, the Web site we launched last year."
PoliticsNow was formed last spring, when PoliticsUSA and Election Line merged. During the campaign, PoliticsNow provided up-to-the-minute coverage of politics and policy issues, much of it culled from ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the National Journal,, and The Washington Post. For many inside as well as outside the Beltway, PoliticsNow was one-stop-shopping for campaign news online.
The 20-some staff members of PoliticsNow were informed of the decision to pull the plug at 2 p.m. EST Tuesday. They were told the site would be taken offline immediately, and a news release was posted to the site at 5 p.m. EST.
"I guess it's sort of like yanking out a tooth," said news editor Brian Hartman. "In a way it's better to not have known it was coming."
Although PoliticsNow, like almost all online ventures, was not profitable, it was selling ad banners and got between 60,000 and 90,000 page views a day, a Digital Ink spokesperson said. Last Election Day, PoliticsNow got about 1.5 million page views.
"We are extremely proud of the standards PoliticsNow has set for democracy on the Web," John Fox Sullivan, president and publisher of the National Journal, said in a statement.
Evans Witt, executive editor of PoliticsNow, recently announced he was leaving the venture to head up Voter News Service, which conducts exit polls and counts the vote in national elections. Officials said Witt's departure had nothing to do with the decision to close PoliticsNow.
"It's been fun for us," read the final staff sign-off. "We hope you enjoyed it too."
