By Katharine Mieszkowski Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff has seen the future of journalism, and it is Politico. That's the upshot of his feature on the politics site, which he characterizes as obsessive, insular, wonky and a must-read inside-the-Beltway.

Gawker points out that Politico isn't actually making any money, but Wolff is less interested in the site's business model than its relationship with its audience.

As he sees it, the Achilles heel of the old-fashioned general-interest model for news was that it spoke to the lowest common denominator, telling readers about many different subjects that they were assumed to know little or nothing about. The new world of news as exemplified by Politico turns that equation on its head. Politico is detailed and comprehensive in the extreme, to the point that it only speaks to those readers who already care deeply about the subject it covers. 

"Politico reduces the world to Rahm Emanuel and to the people who want to be Rahm Emanuel," Wolff writes. "And yet, this is a passionate conversation among quick and deeply knowledgeable folk. The habit and, perhaps, necessity of traditional news organizations to reduce and simplify and attenuate and, in the process, make news flaccid and often wrong have been superseded by these over-informed motormouths. It's the raw stuff, before the family paper or knuckleheaded network news has watered it down.

"It is perhaps useless to argue whether this is good or bad. Rather, the world is as it is. And Politico seems like a pretty credible version of what the world will be: obsessives everywhere in their particular narrow-focused areas of interest ("silos" is the modern information term), flashing ever more information, ever quicker, in ever shorter bites—the shorter you can make it, the more information there can be—to all the ships at sea."