These days, however, Allbritton believes there’s a dearth of good reporter candidates out there, and a need for the real-world training once provided by places like Politico, which he sold in 2021.
“Talking to a ton of senior-to-mid-level execs in media, the constant refrain is: ‘I can’t find great people,’” he said in an interview. “It’s really hard to hire good people.”
Allbritton decided to take matters into his own hands. In April 2023, he launched the Allbritton Journalism Institute as a nonprofit “educational incubator” for the next generation of political reporters. Or, as he pitches it: “Let me be your HR department.”
The idea is that every year, a class of 10 fellows from across the country receive training in Washington from some of the brightest minds in political journalism. The fellows spend nearly two years working as full-time reporters for a new website — called NOTUS, for News of the United States.
“It’s essentially like a teaching hospital for journalism,” said editor in chief Tim Grieve.
While the program operates at a small scale and surely won’t fix the larger problems plaguing journalism in 2024, Allbritton hopes it could fill gaps in the development process left by the decline of local newspapers — as well as address some of his creeping concerns about the ideological motivations of young reporters.
Sitting at a long table in an airy Georgetown office space that was once used for weddings, and nursing a black eye from a recent ski trip, Allbritton said the idea came to him after he realized he needed to figure out his next move, post-Politico. “All of a sudden, it was like, ‘Jesus Christ, I’m like 52, 53, now. What the hell am I going to do?’”
He considered a partnership with a journalism school, and he still believes the schools do important work. But: “When you get to the point where a vast majority of the graduates are going into [public relations] work, are they really doing what their original purpose was?”
NOTUS covers national political stories in a manner not unlike other recent arrivals on the political news scene such as Axios, Semafor and Punchbowl News, and for a similar audience of political insiders. There have been stories on President Biden’s political viability, the Donald Trump hush money trial and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s murky policy agenda. While fellows often co-byline stories with veteran reporters, some — like a recent scoop about an ill-fated meeting between a Trump surrogate and Arab American leaders in Michigan — are written entirely by fellows.
“Really impressed [with] some of the work NOTUS is doing,” Times reporter Jonathan Swan, wrote on X, regarding a story about the political power of the family of indicted Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.). (Haberman seconded that notion.) Another recent story by a fellow, about the Republican congressmen who trudge up to New York to provide the wallpaper at Trump’s trial, earned plaudits from several top political journalists.
Allbritton and his editors say that web traffic is not a huge priority. Four months since its launch, the NOTUS site significantly lags the most established players in the Beltway media scene — with an average of 40,000 unique visitors each month between late February and late April, compared with about 100,000 for Punchbowl and 15.84 million for Axios, according to data from analytics company Similarweb. (NOTUS actually surpassed Punchbowl in visits for the full month of April.)
Still, “I think they are cutting through a little bit more than you would expect,” said Ben Smith, Semafor’s editor in chief. He praised NOTUS’s decision to assign each fellow to cover a state congressional delegation. “It’s totally the right way to cover Congress, to be obsessed with a delegation that is therefore obsessed with you.”
And unlike most other news organizations aimed at a Beltway audience, the goal at NOTUS is not to “win the morning,” as the mantra for Politico went.
“I don’t really think this is competing with anyone,” Grieve said. “We’re really not trying to do breaking news. We’re really not trying to do the news of the day, but to do distinctive journalism. As long as we’re doing that, it doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing.”
Early on, however, it was hard to find the site. In early January, a Google search for “NOTUS” turned up a data firm with the same name; Notus School District 135 (Canyon County, Idaho); and a Wikipedia page for Notus, the Greek god of the south wind. Likewise, an email sent at that time to the contact account for the news organization bounced back as undeliverable.
And while Allbritton and his team have pledged to use their connections to find jobs for the fellows, that might be a challenge in a flooded job market.
“There are a lot of political journalists, to be blunt, and there are a lot of political journalists who are out of work because of layoffs, so there will definitely be a lot of competition for those positions,” said Axios CEO Jim VandeHei, who co-founded Politico. (The failed general-interest news start-up the Messenger laid off hundreds of employees recently, for example.)
VandeHei is also convinced that subject-matter expertise is more important than general political reporting ability, particularly amid the rise of artificial intelligence.
But, he said, “anything that anybody is doing to produce more high-quality journalists is a good thing. Period.”
This year’s cohort of fellows is diverse and includes students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the news industry, including a fellow who attended a Christian college and one who served as an artillery officer in the U.S. Army for seven years.
Allbritton wants the fellows to be exposed to a variety of political ideologies, particularly in what he called a “BLM world, a covid world,” referring to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“There was definitely a kind of a woke kind of shift that took place within newsrooms,” he said. “I wouldn’t say it’s radical. It’s not. But there’s some social-warrior believers in there. I’m not sure they use their voices, but definitely believers. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s good to have an opinion. But it does make it a little harder to get to the truth if you’re coming in there with either a liberal bias or a conservative bias.”
Allbritton said other publishers would say the same thing if put “on truth serum”; his argument has been echoed by New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Kahn, who said in a recent interview that young journalists need to understand that “the newsroom is not a safe space.” At NOTUS, Allbritton believes the team of veterans can help broaden fellows’ minds, citing mentorship from the likes of former Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Atlantic reporter Tim Alberta, from the left and right respectively.
To help jump-start the program, Allbritton, who sold Politico to the German media conglomerate Axel Springer for $1 billion, chipped in $20 million. But ultimately, he’s hoping for corporate sponsorships to sustain it. “It’s going to be a PBS model,” he said. “Along the lines of ‘NewsHour brought to you by BNSF Railways.’”
Some cynics have questioned whether Allbritton set up NOTUS as a nonprofit to avoid breaching a noncompete agreement. While Allbritton said he couldn’t discuss the specifics of any deal with Axel Springer, he said he was permitted to start a nonprofit organization. “This wasn’t contentious at all,” he said.
NOTUS fellows receive an annual stipend of $60,000, which won’t make them rich, but two years of job security is increasingly a rarity in an industry haunted by layoffs and cutbacks.
Amid the broader gloom that has encompassed the media industry, NOTUS’s office is an upbeat place, where fellows and veteran reporters recently batted around ideas during an hour-long pitch meeting. At one point, fellow Ryan Hernández shared a newsy tidbit involving Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.). Reporter Byron Tau asked, “Has that anecdote been reported?”
Before starting his fellowship, Ben Mause was one of few staffers at the Moulton Advertiser in Moulton, Ala. “I could not take days off unless I wanted do double the work the day before, because there was no one else to write anything,” he said.
Now, Mause is covering Georgia politics for NOTUS. “I was just some guy who came from a Bible college, who had been in local news for not even a year, and then they say, ‘We want you to come up report for us from Capitol Hill.’”
Managing Editor Kate Nocera chimed in to say that Mause is selling himself short. They recalled one on-the-job training session in the Speaker’s Lobby at the U.S. Capitol. Nocera encouraged Mause to ask Rep. Lucy McBath a question — and he heeded her advice so dutifully that he followed the Georgia Democrat as she headed toward the women’s restroom. (Nocera quickly called him back.)
Fellow Tinashe Chingarande, who got the scoop about the Trump team’s unsuccessful Michigan meeting, came into the program interested mostly in culture writing. Now, she has grown fond of covering the ins and outs of Michigan’s congressional delegation and the progressive faction of the Democratic Party.
“I want two things: I want a source in the White House who’s going to text me when things happen before anyone else has it,” she said. “And I want a source in the Democrats who is going to record caucus and send it to me, and I write about it. That’s all.”
So far, Chingarande has paired up with CNN veteran Jasmine Wright to write stories about Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Biden’s performance in the South Carolina primary. She said that Wright encouraged her to ask specific questions and offered advice on how to structure her story.
While fellows have the option of leaving the program after 18 months, Chingarande said she would have to be blown away by a job offer to do so. Like, for example, if “The Washington Post called and they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, $300,000 a year.’”
So far, Allbritton said has been impressed by the first class of fellows, even though he couldn’t immediately name a story that stood out to him. And he’s having fun with his latest media endeavor.
Besides, he added, “it beats the s— out of playing tennis or something like that.”
