Traditional political journalists were the last people to notice in 2016 that the world had changed. Candidate Donald Trump took advantage of a stubborn refusal to recognize the power of right-wing ideology and celebrity politics and politically motivated hacking. His campaign made a mockery of political reporters who thought they were — in the old sports metaphor — the referees, blowing their whistles ineffectually as he marched past.

As the institutions of journalism gear up for another presidential campaign, we face an audience that isn’t just bored by tactical, amoral, insidery, and mostly male-dominated political reporting: Americans of all political stripes now actually hate it, and the sports metaphors that used to be a great way to go viral are now the quickest path to a Twitter ratio. The game changer, the horse race, the Hail Mary — apt, perhaps, for the party politics of the 1990s and 2000s — are painfully inadequate for the movement politics of a new era, with higher stakes, higher passions, and far wider interest.

I know of what I speak, because I helped shape the tradition I’m now attacking: I came up in New York’s nascent political blogosphere in the early 2000s, then got a job as part of the launch of Politico, conceived unapologetically as a “needle in the vein of political junkies.” I broke news every day, for years, on obscure staffers and tactics, and shared my readers’ obsession with the horse race. To my mild discomfort, my colleague Jonathan Martin’s and my blogs were actually illustrated with on-the-nose pen-and-ink caricatures of ourselves sitting on a wooden fence watching a literal horse race.