Beltway Boys from Vanity Fair article: Jim VandeHei, John Harris, Robert Allbritton, Mike Allen. Photograph by Gasper Tringale.

Don’t miss Michael Wolff’s great article in Vanity Fair.

On the surface, a paean to Politico: “Four old-media veterans may have solved the future of news with the Politico Web site.”

But arguably a look at Washington’s Fourth Estate and the problems facing general interest newspapers, which are losing readers and revenues at a fast clip. The irony? Politico’s print edition is what has edged their business model out of the red and closer to black.

From the article:

“Politico puts its current traffic at 6.7 million unique visitors per month (down from a high of more than 11 million during the campaign), yet it still can’t support its staff of about 100 on the Internet’s low advertising rates (although, with its agenda-moving audience and its preponderance of advocacy advertisers, it manages to get a higher rate than most sites). But one effect of its Internet traffic and notoriety and the ensuing attention of cable news shows is that the original Allbritton idea for a Capitol Hill paper-one that now largely reprints Internet content-has become, with its special-interest-size circulation of 32,000, a major success. Internet cachet, in other words, has enabled a tabloid-size print version of Politico (also called Politico) to thrive and more than double the company’s revenues-which, just about evenly split between Internet and newspaper, will, it appears, be more than $15 million in 2009-meaning, according to C.E.O. Fred Ryan, that Politico, paying its staffers at nearly the level that The Washington Post pays (starting salaries for reporters at the Post are about $45,000 per year), has hit breakeven.”