Dan Primack, the Southborough-based columnist for Fortune magazine whose e-mail newsletter, Term Sheet, is a must-read in the venture capital community, is moving onto a new venture of his own. He will be joining former Politico chief executive Jim VandeHei and columnist Mike Allen on their forthcoming website, which will target corporate executives with a mix of political and business news. The as-yet-unnamed site is scheduled to launch in January 2017.
The columnist announced the decision in an interview with Recode on Monday.
Primack, who has been covering “deals and dealmakers” at Fortune for the past six years, does so from perch nowhere near the established dens of venture capital, choosing instead to live in the woodsy environs outside of Boston and rely on a network of tipsters.
In an interview on Monday, he said while his new responsibilities are a bit unclear, his readers can expect a few tweaks to his current model.
“It will not exactly be Term Sheet 2.0, but still something with regular daily connection,” he said. “For some reason email still seems to be something that readers feel a personal connection to, that I don’t think I get elsewhere.”
In his newsletter Tuesday, Primack said that while he rarely considered leaving his post — “there is value in knowing how good you’ve got it.” In an interview he elaborated further: the promise of a new endeavor was too alluring to ignore, he said, in part because he was looking to untether himself from corporate media. “I like the idea of diving headfirst where there’s a lot more unknowns than knowns.”
It seems he also likes the thought of working alongside Mike Allen, whose own morning missive, Playbook, had most of the Washington Beltway in its database. (Allen stopped working on Playbook in the summer.) Both he and Allen have for a long time operated independently, working on a morning deadline and never taking a breakfast meeting, Primack said. Allen, he said, is “one of the world’s few people who understand my daily schedule.”
VandeHei and Allen’s snagging of Primack is one of their more high-profile hires. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the duo have raised about $10 million for their new site, from investors including Lerer Hippeau Ventures, whose managing partner, Ken Lerer, is the chairman of BuzzFeed, and co-founded the Huffington Post. Other investors include NBCUniversal; the Emerson Collective, the social justice organization run by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple Inc.’s co-founder Steve Jobs; and David and Katherine Bradley, who own Atlantic Media, the publisher of The Atlantic and Quartz.
Primack has said that working at an angel and venture-backed organization may cause some “degrees of conflict difficulty” that he’s prepared to maneuver through. In the meantime, he plans to publish Term Sheet until October 26, at which point he will switch to using Medium to push news.
Fortune, meanwhile, will continue to own the Term Sheet brand.
Primack is known for regularly tossing references to his beloved Patriots into many of his columns, and said he has no plans to leave the Bay State for the site’s DC headquarters.
“Fortune does have space in downtown Boston, and I technically have an office there, but candidly, I haven’t seen it in a few years,” Primack said.
Janelle Nanos can be reached at janelle.nanos@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @janellenanos.