Playbook’s New Playbook

ryan lizza
Even before the Nuzzi-Lizza diversion, Politico’s leadership had been reassessing the entire Playbook franchise and accelerating plans to overhaul it. Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images
Dylan Byers
October 24, 2024

Earlier this week, as you certainly know by now, New York magazine very tactfully defenestrated its star political journalist Olivia Nuzzi under the cover of an amicable, purportedly mutual, and very self-conscious conscious uncoupling. For more than a month, the magazine and its parentco, Vox Media, had been wrestling with the sordid revelations stemming from Nuzzi’s demure nudes sexting scandal with R.F.K. Jr., her initial prevarications around the nature of that relationship (to put it mildly), and, most pressingly, her lewd and increasingly hostile legal battle with her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, in Washington, D.C.’s Superior Court. So, while a white-shoe law firm found that Nuzzi’s reporting on the presidential campaign contained zero inaccuracies nor evidence of bias, her bosses determined that her future employment was untenable amid this metastasizing clusterfuck.