My boss, Tim Grieve, posted a photo on X last week of a shipment of office chairs that had just arrived at the Arlington, Virginia, headquarters of our new publication, The Washington Sun.
“It’s fun to work in a newsroom where we have to keep adding chairs,” he wrote.
It certainly is.
Until now, I had spent my entire career in the legacy media: eight years at The Wall Street Journal, two at The New Republic, 26 at The Washington Post. Much of that time was a period of managed decline, shrinking budgets, shuttered bureaus, reduced coverage and round after round of buyouts and layoffs.
But today The Washington Sun rises — and with it a belief that we can reimagine the traditional newspaper for the digital age. I hope you’ll join our orbit.
We are embarked on a grand experiment to test whether there is a market in the nation’s capital for a publication that covers the local news, culture and sports that are the glue of any community. And we aim to prove that a general-interest publication combining national and local news can be viable in the 21st century.
Our backer, Politico founder Robert Allbritton, owned D.C.’s NewsChannel 8 and WJLA-TV years ago, and his family once owned one of Washington’s major dailies. He is now placing a big bet on The Sun.
In the past few months, he and Grieve built a 110-person newsroom, more than doubling the size of NOTUS, the political publication they started in 2023 that today becomes The Sun. At least 28 of us are former Posties, including Paul Kane, Jeff Stein, Kadia Goba, Dave Sheinin, Andrew Van Dam, Tom Sietsema, Thomas Boswell and many other names that will be familiar to Post readers. We’re also teaming up with my former colleagues Jason Samenow, Dan Stillman, Ian Livingston and the rest of Capital Weather (called the Capital Weather Gang when they were at the Post) to provide forecasts.
The Sun already has more sports reporters than any other D.C.-area publication, and we’re picking up the high school sports coverage and metropolitan athlete honors that the Post had done for a century until this year. Our local news coverage, spearheaded by such well-known D.C. reporters as Martin Austermuhle (formerly of WAMU and The 51st), is equally ambitious in filling the metro news vacuum for Washingtonians.
Hopefully you’ve noticed, in the months leading up to today’s launch, some of my colleagues’ work, including: Anna Kramer on the Trump administration’s plans to give a piece of Yosemite National Park to developers; Sam Fortier on a son of immigrants denied honors at a national civics competition because of what appeared to be politically driven judging; Ellie Silverman tracking down the Black woman surrounded by white nationalists on the Metro in an iconic July 4 photo; Sietsema’s delicious send-up of the food at Ned’s Club; Boz on the Nats; Elena Schneider and Jasmine Wright on the turmoil at the Democratic National Committee; Reese Gorman on Mike Johnson’s private profanity; Eric Katz on the bed-bug infestation at the USDA agency in charge of controlling invasive pests; and Margaret Manto on Rand Paul’s release of Anthony Fauci’s diary that exposed the medical histories of more than 20 people, including Stephen Miller’s child.
My role at The Sun will be to write frequent columns about the absurd and the outrageous in national politics, as I’ve done for most of my career. I will also file pieces about the country life from Rappahannock County, Virginia, as I’ve been doing for the past few years. I’ll be mixing it up in a new video podcast with my friend Matt Lewis, The Sun’s conservative columnist. That’s all part of The Sun’s Perspectives section, which is run by Richard Just (former editor of The Washington Post Magazine) and Alexa McMahon (another ex-Postie) and will publish opinions from the left, right and center.
The Sun’s success is by no means assured (that will depend on you, the reader) but I think it is vitally important, and not just for those of us on the payroll. We can’t long survive as a democracy, or as a free people, without healthy news organizations that appeal to broad cross sections of our communities.
We need this at the national level to combat the polarization and disinformation driven by social media and AI slop. But we need it even more at the local level. When community journalism dies, research has shown, voter turnout and civic participation decline, corruption increases and the public’s attention turns from matters of shared interest (roads, schools, police) to divisive, national issues.
The local, metropolitan and regional newspapers that performed this civic role for generations have either disappeared or become mere shells of what they once were. And so it has fallen to an assortment of nonprofits, philanthropists and investors to experiment with new models and formats that might fill the gap. The future of the American experiment rests in no small part on their success.
This is why I joined The Sun.
***
I’ve been watching the death spiral of my industry for a quarter century, but I still find the losses staggering when they’re all tallied. Since 2005, more than 270,000 newspaper jobs — 75% of the total — have been lost, Northwestern University’s Medill Journalism School calculated last year. Nearly 3,500 newspapers — about 40% of the total — have vanished over that same time.
So far, the modest growth of employment in all-digital outlets has offset only a sliver of the losses. And other media industries are in similar straits. Broadcast news and news magazines command just a fraction of the audiences they once did. The economics of cable news are in turmoil. The Republican-led Congress cut off federal funding for public broadcasting, while the Trump administration threatens press freedoms, rewards political allies with media ownership and foments distrust of surviving media outlets.
To put the newspaper job losses in perspective, they are comparable to the employment losses in the steel industry during its collapse from the 1970s to the 1990s. As a cub reporter in the Journal’s Pittsburgh bureau in the early ’90s, I wrote about the human toll on steelworkers who lost their livelihood, their families, their health.
I wrote, too, about the related collapse of the labor movement, and I wondered about the toll it had taken on my grandfather, a lawyer who represented trade unions from their heyday in the ’40s and ’50s until shortly before his death in the ’90s. I suspect it contributed to his stomach ulcers and heart disease.
I think I understand that toll better now. I’m one of the lucky ones in the business; I was never laid off, nor pressured to take a buyout. But I saw the suffering of friends and colleagues, and felt the stress of living through constant retreat and instability.
Only a handful of the journalists who started in the newspaper business when I did remain in it. Some wound up at specialty publications, such as Politico, or at TV outlets, or at journalistic life rafts such as The New York Times and The Atlantic. But many others went back to school, or became journalism professors, or joined nonprofits or advocacy groups, or wrote books or speeches, or worked in PR, or cobbled together a living from freelance work and Substack.
In all that time, it never seriously occurred to me to leave the business. I was one of those destined, as the Victorian poet Rudyard Kipling put it, to “watch the things you gave your life to, broken, / And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.”
It felt less like a job than a cause.
***
It turns out this is typical of those who remain in the business. Research on unemployed or former newspaper journalists conducted by Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, found that workers’ responses to the destruction in the industry depended on their innate sense of purpose.
Those who had a “flexible” sense of meaning were able to reinvent their careers by finding something they liked about journalism — the writing, the investigations, the public service — in another field. But those who had a “fixed” meaning believed that their profession was a calling, and they clung to it no matter the cost.
Neither one is inherently correct, and our sense of meaning probably can’t be changed from fixed to flexible or vice versa. There are pluses and minuses to both.
Flexible-meaning types had an easier time moving on from journalism and finding satisfaction elsewhere, Wrzesniewski told me, but they carried a sense of regret. “The magic was gone,” she said, and “being haunted by what you knew your work could be or could feel like is probably a really hard thing to live with.”
Fixed-meaning people, on the other hand, were tightly bound to the role of journalist. “The fixed group benefit massively from truly having found an occupation that they feel is deeply aligned with their identity and their sense of meaning,” Wrzesniewski said. But losing that job “is uniquely wounding to this group because it’s such a violation of their understanding of how they would make their way in the world.”
Those still in journalism today after the devastation of the past two decades are disproportionately fixed-meaning types. I certainly am.
In her 2023 paper, Wrzesniewski and her co-author, Winnie Yun Jiang, likened us to shoemakers who kept plying their trade despite mass production. “Fixed-meaning perceivers may help their occupation to fight destabilization and keep it alive through their commitment to stay regardless of personal cost,” they wrote.
The findings have implications well beyond journalism. The AI revolution is forecast to replace or redefine tens of millions of jobs in the coming years, and the CEO of Anthropic predicts the loss of half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within five years. This would be job loss orders of magnitude greater than my industry’s.
Sally Maitlis, a professor of organizational behavior at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, specializes in personal growth after job loss. She recommends asking yourself a series of questions. What do you like and not like about your work? What else have you thought about doing but never tried, or abandoned prematurely? Could you retire rather than look for something new? If you lost your job, would you be trying to replace the money, or the meaning, or the community?
“We all could be doing that, all the time,” Maitlis said.
***
Ironically, I had spoken to Wrzesniewski and Maitlis for a column I was working on for the Post, around the beginning of this year. But it had to be shelved when mass layoffs came to our own newsroom in early February. We lost about 40% of my colleagues overall, including most of the local staff, and the sports department was eliminated. This round came eight months after a similar bloodletting in the Opinions department, which had ousted its liberal columnists.
I spent a good bit of time mourning what had been lost. I thought about my sense of meaning, and I asked myself Maitlis’ questions. I loved the Post and I loved my work, but I understood that much of the satisfaction I had felt from the job came from the Post’s central role in the region and in the lives of Washingtonians. And that was gone.
So when Grieve and Allbritton came knocking, with ambitions to rebuild what the Washington region had lost, I answered. As they say, it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness — and with your help, The Sun will be a very big candle.
Dana Milbank is a Washington Sun Perspectives columnist.
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