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The Washington Post was evidently in crisis. Jeff Bezos, its owner, had spiked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president, then announced plans to narrow the focus of the opinion section to defend “personal liberties and the free market.” The editorial page editor and several of its most prominent writers had resigned. An estimated 375,000 digital readers had canceled their subscriptions. The Post was trying to bring people back at discounted rates—and did manage to draw several hundred thousand subscribers—but there was an ominous feeling in the newsroom and beyond, as layoff rumors began to circulate. People concerned about what this all meant for the future of the organization, the capital’s journalistic anchor, found themselves wishing a buyer would swoop in.
In late 2024 and early 2025, some turned to an obvious candidate: Robert Allbritton, a second-generation media mogul and Washington, DC, native best known for cofounding Politico, which he later sold for a billion dollars. His family lived in a twenty-something-million-dollar town house in Georgetown. Recently, he had started a new digital publication, NOTUS (News of the United States), focused on Washington politics and policy, which provided on-the-job training for up-and-coming journalists. Allbritton, a serial entrepreneur with a stake in the future of the city, started fielding a lot of calls.
At first, he said, he was spooked by the Post’s legacy costs—“What did I ever do to you?” he joked to those on the other end of the phone, or: “How do you make a millionaire? Take a billionaire and sell him the Post.” Still, by the time a senator rang him up, he was considering it. Allbritton reached out to contacts in Bezos’s orbit to explore the possibility. But the inquiries didn’t go anywhere. Bezos would never sell, apparently; Allbritton sensed that might feel to him like failure, unless maybe someone was willing to significantly overpay, which Allbritton was not going to do. (“The Post is going to continue to be an important institution,” Bezos told CNBC last week. “And in fact, it’s going to be a more important institution because of this financial discipline.”)
About a year later, the Post instituted mass layoffs, dramatically reducing the paper’s scope by, among other things, eliminating its sports section and book reviews and shrinking local coverage to a skeletal staff. Allbritton was approached again, this time by Tim Grieve, the editor he’d recruited to run NOTUS. Grieve relayed a plea from a coalition of Post reporters seeking a life raft—either an investor to back a new publication or just jobs. Grieve’s message reached Allbritton via text as he sat on a chairlift floating high above the ski slopes of Aspen’s Snowmass. His fingers were cold, so his response was brief: “Take em all.”
The result of that decision is a rebranding of NOTUS as The Star, which aims to fill some of the void left by the Post’s retreat with features on local news—the city’s mayoral race, sports, and cultural stories—anchored by political coverage bearing a distinct inside-the-Beltway sensibility. The new name is an homage to an old Post rival, the Washington Star, once owned by Allbritton’s father, Joe. When he announced the initial Post hires, Allbritton said, he was inundated by messages from nostalgic former Washington Star readers hoping he’d take back the title; the paper shut down in 1981. The name of this latest Allbritton venture is a slight misdirection, however: the trademark is owned by Dovid Efune, the owner of the New York Sun. Besides, Allbritton said, replicating the original would be too “backward looking.”
“Detroit makes cars; we make government,” Allbritton told me. “Everybody in this town, in one form or another, they’re here—maybe it’s two or three degrees of separation—but they’re here because the federal government’s here. I don’t care if you’re a plumber living in Frederick, Maryland, who drives in and does work. The reason you got to work here is because somebody who works for the government hired you.” His target audience, he estimates, is some eight to ten thousand people, those who make the federal government’s regulatory sausage—and whom corporate America is willing to pay extraordinary sums on advertising to reach. In recent years, Big Tech, in particular, is believed to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to beat back regulation by buying so-called public affairs ads—which has uniquely enabled Washington, DC, to sustain and develop a crowded stable of outlets and newsletters for Beltway elites: Politico, Punchbowl, Semafor, Axios, Puck, and NOTUS, now The Star.
“The core audience is the people who have the power to shape the future of the country,” Grieve, who had previously been the founding editor of Politico Pro, told me. “Most of them are here in Washington, and those are members of Congress, people at the White House, their staffs, and sort of the people in the infrastructure all around that. If you think of a series of concentric circles, those are the people in the bull’s-eye of the audience that we’re trying to reach.” Allbritton claims that NOTUS’s morning newsletter lands in more than 90 percent of House offices, and 80 percent of the Senate. “I know everybody in the White House reads it,” he told me. “I know all the heads of the agencies read it, or their chief of staff or whoever.” (Hill staffers I asked had the same impression.)
The full remit of The Star, the exact size of the newsroom, and the particulars of its audience are, however, still under discussion. Pre- and post-rebrand, the site’s readership, both Grieve and Allbritton insist, has always been, as Allbritton put it, “anybody who lives or operates in the Washington area or just has interest in what goes on at Washington from a nationwide perspective”—a wider set than policymakers per se. But the broad outlines of Allbritton’s plan involve an initial investment of about ten million dollars to fund the expansion, with an aim to double the newsroom staff, from forty-five to close to a hundred by year’s end. “We’re building the next great Washington newsroom,” Grieve told me.
Newly arrived Post expats include Paul Kane, the former congressional correspondent; Dana Milbank, the veteran columnist; and Sam Fortier, who covered national sports. Former Post editors have signed on, too: Nikie Johnson, who did breaking news; Kelley French, a narrative accountability editor; and Missy Khamvongsa, the former deputy breaking news editor for national politics. The Star has also hired from Axios, Politico, Bloomberg, HuffPost, and CNN. To reach Washingtonians at some remove from the power center, Allbritton brought on four local reporters, including a former Post food critic. More announcements are coming, with a target of roughly ten on the team tasked with covering the city. “When you take away that kind of sense of localism out of the Post, what does it become?” Allbritton said. “That was my concern.”
The mass defections, along with Allbritton’s chosen name, have inevitably kindled talk of a revived newspaper war. The rebrand has drawn questions about how it will work for a new publication, just starting to establish a reputation as a sharp-eyed monitor of the federal government, to spin off broadly accessible, effective local journalism, which the Post struggled to sustain. Allbritton told me that he has taken no pleasure in the Post’s recent misery, which he compared to having a friend who is terminally ill. In the case of the Post, he said, the sickness was so far advanced that he felt some measure of relief when it became clear that he would be denied the opportunity to bid on it. “The Post that everybody remembers and loves of twenty years ago, I just don’t see it coming back,” he told me. To save it would require tearing down a “historic monument and rebuilding something new.” But as he put it, “I’d rather build on a new lot.”
The offices of the outlet that as of June 3 will be known as The Star are in Rosslyn, Virginia, a neighborhood of steel-and-glass office towers directly across the Potomac from downtown DC. The scene is in many ways that of a typical Washington newsroom: young badge-wearers clutching coffee cups under fluorescent lights, eyeballs in monitors, a TV screen airing cable news on a far wall. But when I visited, on a recent morning in May, something felt different. It took me a minute to identify what it was: the quiet of people about to move in. “They just keep adding to my team, and now we have critical mass,” Deirdre Walsh, who arrived from NPR in January to lead congressional coverage, told me. “This is a very different vibe than I’m used to—in a good way. The fact that we can create this process and not have to go through layers and committees is amazing. We’re in charge. It’s the reason I came here.” George Cahlink, her deputy, said it was his third day. Justin Peligri, the chief of staff, told me that he had a meeting later that afternoon about adding furniture.
Allbritton sat down with me in a conference room. He is a boyish fifty-seven, trim, with gray-flecked brown hair parted to one side, and rectangular glasses. He seemed to be enjoying himself. The building houses both The Star and the Allbritton Journalism Institute (AJI), a nonprofit that was the foundation of the enterprise; all profits generated by the publication feed into an endowment that Allbritton has set up for AJI. In 2021, when he sold Politico to Axel Springer, he’d felt the place had grown too big to be fun: “Shit, I just walked down the hall,” he recalled thinking. “It was hard to find a friendly face, or a face you recognized.” Once he cashed out, his wife, Elena, said to him, “You’re not sitting around here,” he remembered. He thought to himself, “Oh shit, I’ve got to do something,” he told me. “What the hell am I going to do?”
Elena, whom he’d met as a college student, at Wesleyan, was a dermatologist. “Doctors have teaching hospitals where young physicians go learn from more experienced physicians, and they slowly turn them loose and let them do more and more procedures on humans,” Allbritton said. “Why don’t we do the same with reporters?” He figured he would create something like a medical residency in the form of a reporting fellowship: a training program within a news organization.
In May of 2023, Allbritton announced a twenty-million-dollar commitment to AJI, an initiative that would educate aspiring journalists from underrepresented backgrounds and put them to work. Starting that September, the first class of ten fellows, chosen from more than six hundred applicants, would be paid an annual sixty-thousand-dollar salary for two years, plus benefits. After undergoing a four-week immersion course covering ethics, newsgathering, and writing, they would be thrown into the job, working for established editors. Allbritton hired Grieve to run the operation and recruited Richard Just, a former editor at the Post; Kate Nocera, who had been a senior editor at Axios; and Matt Berman, of BuzzFeed News. The fellows’ training ground would be Capitol Hill. “Congress is actually pretty easy to cover,” Allbritton said. “The stuff’s important. They’re actually understaffed up there, not overstaffed.”
NOTUS debuted in January of 2024. Each of the fellows was assigned a wide range of stories—as well as a specific congressional delegation, intended to fill a gap left by the demise of regional newspapers, which used to field Washington correspondents. NOTUS formalized collaborations with news outlets in the home states of twelve of those delegations, partnering mostly with nonprofits everywhere from North Carolina to San Diego; several more joined last fall. The “Washington Bureau Initiative,” as it became known, provided fellows an education and aimed to help hold elected officials accountable to constituents.
Stories appeared on the NOTUS website and in the newsletter; relevant coverage also appeared on the platforms of partner publications in different states. “It’s a really nice sort of synergy in that you have the local informing the national, the national informing the local,” Warwick Sabin—the president and CEO of Deep South Today, a nonprofit news network that operates Verite News in New Orleans and Mississippi Today, among other outlets—told me. “Together I think you have a richer coverage. It’s very, very valuable for our readers to be getting news directly from Washington, where so much is happening that affects them and where so many congressional leaders happen to come from our states.”
Within a few months of its debut, NOTUS was generating scoops: There was a story about Texas counties along the Mexican border using federal grants to acquire surveillance technology commonly found in war zones and espionage operations. The technology allowed local law enforcement officers, thanks to a regulatory loophole, to track people without the typical required warrant. In another report, a fellow named Ben T.N. Mause revealed the shortcomings of a new campaign finance and lobbying e-filing system in Georgia; several weeks later, the state scrapped its plans. Tinashe Chingarande, an AJI fellow covering Michigan’s congressional delegation, detailed an election year meeting between forty Arab American leaders in Troy, Michigan, and a Trump surrogate. The surrogate, she reported, “came off as unsympathetic to the plight of Palestinians while actually angering some participants.” The story was highlighted in, among other places, the Post.
Perhaps the biggest early story—one that Allbritton cites as quintessentially NOTUS—came in May of 2025, when a pair of AJI fellows, Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto, revealed that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” commission report contained citations “rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions”—and that several of its sources didn’t exist at all. Afterward, a new version of the MAHA report was published on the White House website, replacing the faulty citations NOTUS had identified; at a briefing, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, wouldn’t comment on whether the report was produced using AI. “It’s shoeleather and it’s being able to affect a conversation,” Allbritton said. “It’s the ability to actually move the needle a little bit one way or another.”
By the fall, NOTUS had dozens of employees. Alumni from the inaugural class of AJI fellows had found jobs at Bloomberg, Politico, and the Miami Herald. NOTUS declined to disclose the number of subscribers or page views, but Allbritton said the site was on track to break even within several months. He had always planned on growing the operation, if not necessarily right away.
Then came the panic at the Post. Jeff Stein, who was the Post’s chief economics correspondent, had heard rumors that Allbritton tried to buy the paper and suggested to some colleagues that perhaps he’d be interested in funding something novel. He reached out to Grieve with a detailed memo, seeking backing—at which point Allbritton felt he needed to act. (Stein, now a Star recruit, said he is “thrilled” with how the situation turned out.) Bezos wanted the Post to follow the data and write for a global audience. (“The Post needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet,” Bezos told CNBC. “I didn’t pick who was going to get laid off or which departments. I said, follow the data, follow the data,” he added—with one exception: “The heart of the Post is investigative reporting.”) NOTUS, Allbritton decided, would adjust its mandate and fill the local news space from which the Post was withdrawing. “There’s got to be something that anchors the whole city together,” he told me.
For Allbritton, the tilt toward local news was personal. He came to DC when he was seven years old, on Star business. In 1974, Joe, his father—a Mississippi-born, Texas-raised entrepreneur who made a fortune flipping real estate and investing in banks, insurance companies, and mortuaries—acquired the Washington Star. The paper was struggling; he moved the family from Houston, with some prompting from his wife, hoping to turn it around. That didn’t pan out; after four years, Joe ended up selling to Time Inc. and, before long, the paper closed.
Later, Joe, a friend of Ronald Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s, founded NewsChannel 8, one of the country’s first twenty-four-hour local news channels. By 1981 his fortune was estimated (conservatively) at two hundred million dollars; while he remained in banking, his media company, Allbritton Communications, grew to eight TV stations. When Robert, an only child, graduated from college, in 1992, he got to work in the family business. He soon learned, he said, “I really hated banking.” By 2000, he was Allbritton Communications’ chief operating officer.
Then his father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. On Valentine’s Day, 2001, Robert Allbritton became the chairman and chief executive of Riggs National Corporation, the holding company of the region’s largest bank. A little more than six months later came the attacks of September 11. In the aftermath, federal investigators discovered that a Saudi diplomat had routed payments to some of the hijackers through a Riggs account. That, in turn, led to an investigation that revealed the bank had done business with dictators with long records of human rights abuses, including Augusto Pinochet, of Chile. “It was a close-up examination of what a government three-ring circus looks like,” Allbritton said. “It was just one thing after another. So I learned about crisis management in the business I didn’t even know anything about. I handled the media side because I understood that to a certain degree.” Riggs eventually pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws and agreed to pay forty-one million dollars in fines. In 2004, Riggs was sold, and Allbritton focused on the news business.
As he emerged from the fray, he set out to diversify the family’s media holdings. He was intrigued by Roll Call and The Hill, both profitable must-reads in DC at the time. Along with Fred Ryan—who was then the president and COO of Allbritton Communications, later the chief executive of the Post—he entered negotiations with Jimmy Finkelstein, who owned The Hill. But they walked away when Finkelstein raised his asking price, and they elected instead to start what became Politico. “What Politico really did,” Allbritton said, “was it took things that everybody was talking about around the bar—the way you would talk about a colleague in a newsroom—and it really brought that to the public in a very rapid way. It really was the ultimate experiment in transparency, the willingness to publish that story that everybody is talking about, and nobody wrote about.” It also put online what others had merely committed to print.
One thing Politico demonstrated was corporate America’s willingness to pay previously unimagined sums for advertising in order to influence Congress, the White House, and other policymakers. By the time Allbritton sold, Vanity Fair reported, Politico’s Playbook was charging on average three hundred thousand dollars for a weeklong sponsorship. Such is the power of the Washington, DC, audience—which also has, perhaps, a disproportionate interest in news, from the significant to the scooplet. “I would say there’s an infinite appetite for original, interesting reporting,” Marcus Brauchli, a former executive editor of the Post, told me. “There’s not infinite demand for more newsletters or more products. There’s just infinite demand for more fresh content.” The Post, he noted, still manages to do good work. “The gap that they’ve opened,” he said, “is in local.”
Kara Swisher—a Post alum who has been one of the most vocal critics of the changes under Bezos—enjoys NOTUS. “Washington’s a real opportunity,” she told me. “Bezos has repeatedly driven the Post into a wall and continues to do so. There’s a really interesting opening, especially around sports. If I were him”—Allbritton—“I’d focus in on sports, a little bit of local news, obviously, and in politics the stuff that isn’t the day-to-day sort of economy of Washington, in the center of government.”
Allbritton insists that he is not looking to replace or imitate the Post. The Star is unlikely to send somebody to cover what he calls “the micro”—the Alexandria school board, for instance. But when sewage leaks into the Potomac, that’s a story, he said, and it merits coverage. “It’s a little like the definition of pornography,” he told me of The Star’s local purview. “I’ll know it when I see it.” In general, he said, “when a story gets big, we need to be on it.”
Figuring out the details will be up to Jeff Dooley—a former sports and business editor who oversaw special newsroom initiatives and partnerships at the Post and is now leading the expansion of local DC news and sports coverage at The Star. I encountered him during my recent visit, on the far side of the newsroom. He was still unpacking. “We want this coverage to be additive for the existing readership,” he told me. “A lot of those readers are political diehards who live and work in this area and will have a vested interest in our local coverage, everything from news to sports to food.”
There’s also an opportunity, Dooley said, to reach new readers in the DC metro area who “maybe aren’t as super plugged in on the political story but still care deeply about their local news, about what’s going on in their neighborhoods, in their kids’ schools, want to know which new restaurants to try, want to know if the Nats are going to be any good.” The Star will not run box scores, but will report on the Nationals, Wizards, Capitals, Mystics, Commanders, and Spirit; there are plans for a newsletter featuring local and sports coverage. In many major metro newspapers, Dooley noted, sports is the biggest driver of subscriptions. How The Star’s new subscription system will work is still being determined—Ernesto Lopez, another Post expat, who will head up consumer subscriptions, started the same day as Dooley. In the meantime, Dooley has plans to cover suburban battles forming over data centers, the status of Trump’s arch plan, and other local-market fare.
Beyond that, there may well be room for improvement. “I don’t know how much I think the Washington Post served the city’s Black residents, to be honest, ever. And I think this has made an opportunity,” Emmanuel Felton, who was until recently a national race and ethnicity reporter at the Post, told me. “I would be really interested in, like, is this new newsroom going to reflect the demographics of DC? I think it’s going to need a plan to reach this community that, for a lot of reasons, didn’t trust the Post much—and doesn’t trust media writ large much.” Even so, he wondered aloud, “if you’re going to do it, you’re definitely not going to do it with a new Politico, right?”
This question of where, exactly, The Star fits into the DC media market, and who it aims to serve, may not be entirely straightforward. Shaping a publication to appeal to an audience of political elites is a proven commercially viable approach. Figuring out how that translates to local journalism well fitted to all the city’s contours is harder. “I’m a little bit baffled by their editorial plan that seemed to put a great deal of emphasis on both national news and local news,” said Edward Wasserman, a professor and former dean of the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. There’s a vast difference, he observed, between the “highly specialized, highly focused, highly targeted kind of informational stream and reporting focus” found in Washington newsletters like the original NOTUS and a metro paper that offers a “breadth of appeal in terms of civic and cultural importance and impact.” Wasserman, who grew up in DC, suggested that “using ‘The Star’ may be a mistake in the sense that it claims a kind of community, it claims to become an informational civic presence that is probably going to elude them.” He added: “I don’t see the economic base for it, the revenue sources for it.”
Erik Wemple—who spent years editing the Washington City Paper, worked for the Post, and now covers media for the New York Times—said the city has an “overwhelming” need for local news. “There’s an audience out there that is thirsting for the sort of coverage and the saturation level of coverage that existed decades ago,” he said. “But the business model has been troubled for some time. No one has a panacea.” The Star, in his view, seems as promising an idea as any. “Obviously the Post went for anybody who would click, anybody who would pay for local news. But that model didn’t work, right? So I don’t think NOTUS would want to go in that direction and get everybody,” he said. “The ecosystem needs as much experimentation, as many different sorts of models, as we can find, honestly.”
From the time NOTUS started, it quickly got a piece of the ad-buy pie from the familiar sources—including Big Tech, in which AI companies are increasingly represented. Recently, Anthropic sponsored a week of the NOTUS newsletter: “Our data centers. Our responsibility,” one message went. “Anthropic will cover electricity price increases from its data centers and invest in grid optimization tools, helping keep prices lower for American ratepayers.” Following a reported item on how AI regulation might be affected by a Democratic takeover of Congress, there appeared another ad touting “Claude, the AI for problem solvers.” This text sat beside other stories about the goings-on in the federal government: “The investigators going after Trump’s political enemies. Dispatches from Trump’s visit to China. Nebraska’s blue dot tossup. The state of sexual harassment training in Congress,” and more.
Stephen Farnsworth, the director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington, immediately recognized the DNA of Politico in NOTUS, which he described as “a vehicle for younger, scrappier reporters combined with more experienced talent that has gotten laid off or bought out from other news organizations.” For sponsors, he said, the appeal is strong: “Certainly if you’re selling to Washington lobbyists, there’s a deep well, and there’s still water in it.” But he does wonder about the shape of The Star’s audience, and what expansion looks like. “The field seems a great deal more crowded than it was ten years ago,” he told me. “We may be reaching a point in the newsletter media environment sort of like late-night comedy—where at a certain point, another late-night comedy show is mainly only taking audiences from other late-night comedy shows.”
Allbritton imagines that politics and local coverage will “stand pretty independently of one another” in terms of the business. He expects subscriptions to The Star will eventually account for 50 percent of its revenue, possibly more. “It’s going to be consumer subscriptions. It’s not going to be Politico Pro all over again,” he said. “Because then we’re just repeating the same business. We’ll price it under the Post.” As a Washington journalist told me, “Robert’s not dumb, and Tim Grieve is certainly not dumb, and they’ll figure out—if there’s a way to make money in this, they’ll make it.” Besides, Farnsworth noted, The Star “has a lot of runway because there’s a rich backer. The secret sauce today seems to be: find an affluent backer who’s committed to news.”
In Allbritton’s telling, NOTUS has found its niche among competitors: Axios, he said, went after a national audience, and is not “laser-focused on the halls of power in DC.” Punchbowl is Hill-obsessed: “I mean, Jake [Sherman] will tell you what time Chuck Schumer’s going to the bathroom. That’s pretty granular,” he told me. “Granted, there’s some people who want that, but like, wow, that’s a lot more detail than I needed.” Semafor is an event business, he said, with a highly educated audience interested in international affairs. Politico has a new editor who has described an aim of “connecting the dots as power flows across borders and sectors”—to which Allbritton responded, “That’s not the Politico I remember. Back in the day, whoever was going to be editor in chief of Politico would have said, ‘We are laser-focused on Washington, DC, and nothing else.’”
And then there’s the Post. “I wouldn’t write off the Post in local coverage yet,” Brauchli noted. “They should be trying to figure out how they could rebuild something strong and new in the local space that is better than what we had before and people will like.” A Post spokesperson said the newsroom is committed to serving its local audience through the Metro team and other desks covering stories in and about Washington.
The very notion of a newspaper—a mosaic of up-to-date information about and for different people, places, and niche interests—is not a settled subject; local news will always be valuable and important, but alternate forms are emerging, unbundling, say, coverage of a school board vote from an article about national education policy. In a city such as DC, news consumers are already experimenting with different modes, taking intel wherever they can get it—including AI products, which can cull from various sources and summarize stories based on personal preference. Of course, that is not all the same as original reporting—which The Star, with its still-developing sensibility, is positioned to support. “So is it crowded? Yeah,” Allbritton told me. “But is it too crowded? Well, hell, they said that when we started Politico.”
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