A young woman later direct-messaged me to ask for elaboration. She wrote:Another smart difference: AxiosHQ seems like it will encompass not just content, but also the format of that content:
— Jonathan Rick (@jrick) December 11, 2020
“Soon enough, company memos could end up looking like Axios newsletters, with the same subheads — one big thing, what’s next, go deeper, and why it matters.”
“I’ve seen a lot of comparisons to Substack and some to Basecamp, but it seems like AxiosHQ is just an internal communications tool, owned by a media company, which is where I see some folks hesitating.”
I replied as follows:
“There’s no reason Substack or Basecamp or Medium or Microsoft or Slack or Salesforce or Facebook couldn’t have invented AxiosHQ. But the reason they didn’t — and Axios did — is less about technology and more about publishing.
“That is, tech companies focus on features, not messaging. They’re interested in helping people communicate more quickly, not more clearly.
“That’s a subtle nuance, but it’s also Axios’s advantage — its secret sauce: By encouraging people to use subheadings and short paragraphs, AxiosHQ will make messages, of all kinds and across all industries, more organized and thus more effective.
