Politico has revealed its founding editorial team behind Canberra Playbook.
Paul Karp is joining as Canberra Playbook Editor, while Finn McHugh and Miriam Webber have been appointed as inaugural Canberra Playbook co-authors. The editorial operation will be led by Australia launch editor Ryan Heath.
Karp joins from the Australian Financial Review, where he served as a Sydney-based politics reporter and broke the globe-spanning story that Deloitte had inserted AI-generated hallucinations into a government report.
Prior to that, as Canberra-based chief political correspondent for Guardian Australia, he produced exclusives around the High Court’s decision to strike down the government’s immigration detention policy, which saw him highly commended for the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery Journalist of the Year award in 2024.
McHugh and Webber will serve as Canberra Playbook’s inaugural co-authors, bringing strong federal reporting experience, distinctive voices and complementary backgrounds across politics, policy, public sector coverage and digital journalism. Together with Heath and Karp, they will help build the newsletter from the ground up and set the agenda for Australia’s political community each morning.
McHugh joins after serving as political correspondent at Capital Brief, covering Australian politics for News Corp, The Canberra Times and SBS, as well as reporting in the Middle East
Webber rejoins Politico from The Canberra Times, where she covered politics and the public sector, with a focus on integrity, transparency and accountability in government.
She was previously Brussels Playbook producer, making this a return to the Playbook fold as a reporter.
“Politico’s future is global, and it is rooted in the same qualities that have defined us from the beginning: urgency, authority, competitiveness and deep reporting on power,” said Jonathan Greenberger, Politico global editor-in-chief.
“Australia is at the centre of many of the defining political and policy debates of our time. With Canberra Playbook, we are bringing Politico’s distinctive journalism to another power centre, delivering the authoritative reporting our audience needs, and connecting Canberra more closely to the conversations shaping politics and policy around the world.”
The Canberra Playbook will launch on 17 August, when the Australian Parliament returns from its winter recess.
