Part 2

A new job. A trusted editor. Let's ride.

A photo of a weathered chair next to a lagoon in South Carolina, where I was recently on vacation before starting my next job.

Part 2

The day after I was laid off in February, I drove to Office Depot — yes, they still exist— and bought a stack of white legal pads and a bag of my favorite pens (BIC, ballpoint, black or blue). Ends are also beginnings, which, for me, required a literal blank page to start mapping out the rest of my life. So from Office Depot, I headed to a coffee shop in my neighborhood, where I scored the corner table, the one right by a working outlet, unwrapped a legal pad and wrote Part 2 at the top. Then I traced over the letters and number to make it bold. Then, well, I started crying, dappling the paper with little tear drops.

As far as career things go, the last few months were tough, by far the hardest I’ve ever had. But. But! I write to you today with excellent news: I have joined The Star as a sports enterprise reporter. I am already on staff and working away. And I couldn’t be happier about how a crazy, trying process worked out, since it led me to an outlet that is committed to actual journalism at a time when that feels more important than ever.

First, let me tell you a bit more about The Star. The D.C.-based outlet has been called NOTUS, which stands for News of the United States, but will officially be renamed (and relaunched) on Wednesday. Here’s the website. Here are the X and Instagram accounts. Here is some recent coverage of its history and big ambitions. For over two years now, the staff, a mix of veteran and up-and-coming reporters, has covered the hell out of politics and everything on Capitol Hill. Then after my former employer let go of hundreds of people in February, The Star began to expand, which eventually included plans for a small (but mighty) sports section, which now includes me.

I will be covering a mash-up of the topics I wrote about most at the Washington Post: the overlap of sports and politics, the ongoing overlap of college sports and Capitol Hill, the Washington Nationals (!). When it comes to the sports section, everything is new at The Star, so I’m going to be throwing a lot at the wall, weighing reader feedback, seeing what sticks. But in all my conversations with the company’s leadership, it’s clear the guiding light is in-depth stories built on dogged reporting and creative storytelling.

It’s a dream, really, in many ways. Because I also need to tell you some more about my new (old) editor.

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Nine years ago, when I started at the Washington Post as a high school sports reporter, I beat my editor to the paper by one week. His name was Jeff Dooley, and all I knew was that he was coming from Pro Football Focus and was very soft spoken on the phone. I had filled my application with more than a dozen story ideas. But after one of my first meetings with Jeff, I scrapped the entire list and started over. He told me to think of the job as big as possible, that we’d worry about money and travel and word counts when we had to, but not a moment before. I was 22. I may as well have floated home that night.

And then — and this is important — he backed it up. I spent the entire next fall with one high school football team, the idea being to write from a super zoomed-in level about being a teenager in Donald Trump’s America (Part 1). The final product is still the longest thing I’ve written, non-book category, and included a double-truck spread with some of the best sports photos I’ve ever seen. I then traveled to Fraser, Montana in the middle of winter to profile a girls high school basketball star who was trying to play her way off her Native American reservation. Then, a few months later, I was in Cairo, Illinois, where I reported a story on another teenage basketball star, which was really about a town reeling from the closing of its two major public housing complexes, which was really about the death of a certain way of American life. That ran on the front page, above the fold with a feature photo.

Shortly after it published, though, I switched beats. Jeff was then promoted to edit the Post’s NFL coverage. Our careers kept going in different directions from there, though we always stayed close, dreaming up the next big swing, joking that maybe some day he would edit me again, so I could finally get to the ideas he liked best.

And then, after the Post laid us both off, Jeff was hired to run The Star’s sports and local sections. And now he’s my boss again.

Editors don’t get nearly enough shine, and I’m not saying that because I’d like Jeff to soon post my bad jokes on the internet. When I was working on that season-long feature on the high school football team, I was often crippled by self doubt, worried I would fumble the rare opportunity for time and space at a daily paper. But whenever I was spiraling, Jeff would tell me to meet him at Lost & Found, a bar on 9th Street in D.C. He’d buy my pour of Old Grand Dad. We would then spend hours talking everything through, from structure to whatever interview I had next. Again, I was in my early 20s and could barely tie my shoes. Jeff lived with his partner, who became his wife, and I imagined then, same as I imagine it now, that he had a real life and much better things to do. Yet he cared about the story like it was also his, which it very much was. He made it a lot easier to feel afraid.

The best editors, for me, are partners in the work, invested as if every win and loss is shared. I’ve already had a few of those in my career, and I feel lucky, almost beyond belief, that I get to keep hacking away with one of them. And since I know a lot of D.C. folks subscribe to the newsletter, let me close with this: I believe in The Star’s coming coverage of the city, including its teams and its influence on the sports world, because I believe in Jeff, full stop. But I won’t ask you to just take it from me.

Nah, we’re going to prove it, one story at a time.

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I’ll soon be talking a lot more about the publication, my new colleagues and my work for The Star, which will start publishing this week. (Spoiler: Up first for me is a return to my Nationals roots.) When The Star turns on subscriptions, I’ll certainly tell you about how to sign up and support our mission. But until then, look out for the re-launch Wednesday and a ton of great reads. I’ll link the website again for good measure. It’s going to be a fun ride. It’s good to be back.