The POLITICO class of ‘22: Eugene Daniels, Goli Sheikholeslami, Dafna Lizner, and Ryan Lizza attend Paramount’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner after party at the Residence of the French Ambassador on April 30, 2022, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Shedrick Pelt/Getty Images)
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In tonight’s edition, we have had an all-star line-up on this season of The Breaker Pod. From Tina Brown to Piers Morgan, Jeff Fager to Janice Min, Tonight we are finishing off the year with a bang. Our guest on our season finale is none other than the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick. Remnick joins us for a chinwag about the future of The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos, the Harvey Weinstein investigation that bagged the magazine a Pulitzer Prize, and the never-ending question of who will succeed him at The New Yorker.
Also, tonight, it has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year at POLITICO. Staffers celebrated and commiserated in a food court opposite their newsroom at the company holiday party earlier this week, but we have fresh reporting on what is in store at the Axel Springer-owned outlet in 2026 – and it’s pretty grim.
Plus a bizarre story about how editors at The Daily Mail took an employee to task over the volume of their sneeze (we have an audio recording to prove it), we name the editor of a new food media start-up created by one of the co-founders of Puck and reveal which private members club the “Queen of Scandal PR” hosted their holiday party at.
Finally, it’s Thursday, which means Journo Jobs is back. Tonight, we have gigs at NOTUS, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Rolling Stone.
Mentioned tonight: Brian Roberts, Mathias Döpfner, Meredith Kopit Levien, Will Lewis, Dasha Burns, Risa Heller, Ronan Farrow, Rachael Bade, Olivia Nuzzi, David Ellison, Goli Sheikholeslami, John Harris, Bari Weiss, Jake Tapper, Alex Thompson, Justin Smith, Katie Davies, Dana Brown, Max Tcheyan, Cesar Conde, Joe Weisenthal, Jodi Kantor, Hillary Frey, Jim Rutenberg, Felix Salmon, Whitney Snyder, Jonathan Lemire, Jonathan Rosen, Jon Kelly, Dylan Byers, Risa Heller, Nate Evans, Ben Smith, Paul Needham, Emily Sundberg, Charlotte Klein, Maxi Tani, Liz Hoffman, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Michael Barbaro, Andrew Epstein, David Haskell, Katie Drummond, Katie Robertson, Foster Kamer, Lydia Polgreen, Mohammed Hadi, Rohan Goswami, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, Nayeema Raza, Kyle Margolis, Pat Kiernan, Chris Balfe, Myles Udland, Sara Fischer, Brian Morrissey, Tina Brown, Alex Sherman, James Fontanella-Khan, Sujeet Indap, Oliver Barnes, Emma Orlow, Annie Armstrong, and more.
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David Remnick on The Breaker Pod: New Yorker Succession, Trump, Bezos, and the Press Under Pressure
(Exclusive.) Our guest on the final Breaker Pod for 2025 is none other than David Remnick. Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998, a publication he originally joined as a staff writer back in 1992.
This week’s pod was recorded live at the two Michelin-starred restaurant Saga, perched sixty-three floors above the Financial District (Cheers to Kent Hospitality Group for inviting us down).
We asked Remnick if he had read either ex-Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter’s “When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines” or NYT Media Correspondent Michael Grynbaum’s “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America.”
“I did read them, and I've read many in the past, and I've read all the New Yorker books,” Remnick admitted, but do any of the excesses of the Condé glory days still hold up? “That whole business where your assistant flies out to California to prepare your hotel room for you, what the hell?”
This year, The New Yorker celebrated its 100th year in publication, their pathway through some of the most dynamic changes in media history has kept its legacy well and truly intact. So how did the magazine survive the digital evolution when suddenly all news content was free?
“It was a unique problem. It's certainly not a problem that I've ever encountered,” said Remnick “I would go to these meetings and see that our readers were incredibly loyal, way off the charts… and so eventually that mentality meant a message to the reader, which was, if you want this thing we do, and I hope you do, and we love doing it. You got to pony up.”
It was a winning strategy for the magazine at the time, and it has kept The New Yorker as the crown jewel of the Condé empire, but does that mean the magazine is immune to the cuts faced by others (such as Teen Vogue)? “I never assume it,” Remnick told us. “I assume that we have to be great and we have to be successful.”
While The New Yorker continues to build on its legacy, we asked Remnick about his future with the publication and if or when his time at the helm might come to an end.
“You don't…
Politico Pain
(Exclusive.) On Tuesday night, POLITICO staffers gathered at UPSIDE on Moore, a food hall opposite their Rosslyn newsroom, for their holiday party.
It was a far cry from previous years, when colleagues were flown in from cities far and wide for a glitzy shindig that took over Capital Turnaround, a historic Navy Yard barn that is now an events space.
As staffers chewed on pizza and swilled beers and glasses of wine, the conversation quickly turned to what 2026 may bring for the Axel Springer operation.
They did not have to wait long to get an indication. On Thursday morning, POLITICO CEO Goli Sheikholeslami and Global Editor-in-Chief John Harris sent a memo, obtained and reviewed by Breaker, to all staff.
”Before POLITICOs from Berlin to Sacramento begin to disperse for the holidays, we wish to seize your attention for one last and heartfelt message of 2025. Recent gatherings on both sides of the Atlantic left us both so taken with pride and appreciation for this team," the note said.
But it was a line buried towards the end of the memo that had several POLITICO staffers, who spoke with Breaker on Thursday, alarmed.
“We can’t predict what 2026 will look like with any more precision than most of us could have summoned a year ago about the seismic events of 2025,” the dynamic duo wrote. “The one safe bet is that the next twelve months will be as tumultuous as the past twelve.”
And Breaker has learned 2026 will be particularly “tumultuous” at POLITICO because…