The Friday Reporter

When Rob Ott and I were in college, we had to sign into the computer lab just to set up an email address. No cell phones. No inbox in your pocket. And everyone told us there wouldn’t be any jobs when we graduated. Thirty years later we’re still friends. Our kids are hearing the same warning. Rob is an executive coach now. Before that he built a career in cancer research and ran business operations...

Behind Darren Samuelsohn on our call sat a plastic tub. Then another one. Inside are about 200 journals, decades of a reporter writing to himself, and he’s working his way through every one of them. Darren and I go back years. Energy, then politics. He was the reporter and I was the flack, and we’ve both changed our shade a few times since. In late 2022, one of those journal entries saved him. His...

In 2004, Jon Seaton went door to door for Bush-Cheney with a clipboard. Can the president count on your support? Great. I can get you a yard sign. There were never enough yard signs. Somewhere in Arlington there are probably still boxes of those sheets, every answer written in pen. Jon and I came up together in Bush world — him in the field, me on the communications side. He went on to run John Mc...

For 25 years I wrote words that weren’t my own. At the Department of Commerce, in the Speaker’s office, at the RNC, for elected officials and whoever else I worked for. That’s the job. The best communicators are the ones you never see. Alethia Jackson calls it being the whisperer. When she invited me onto The Power Within, her podcast about power, influence and modern leadership, I got to be the o...

The morning after the 2016 election, Katie Harbath sat at a red light on Constitution Avenue in a daze. She had gotten home around 3 a.m. and fallen asleep on the couch in her clothes, CNN still on. She didn’t know exactly what was coming for Facebook. She knew something was. That’s where her new book opens. Katie ran Facebook’s global elections work for a decade, through 2016, Cambridge Analytica...

And we’re back with Part Two of this week’s Congressional Women’s Softball Game special. If you listened to my first conversation with Senator Shelly Moore Capito and Emily Goodin, you already know this game is about a lot more than what happens on the field. For this second episode, I’m joined by Atalie Ebersole and Mary Ajango, who bring another perspective on the game, the Young Survival Coalit...

THE FRIDAY REPORTER This is a special two-fer edition of The Friday Reporter because sometimes one conversation just isn’t enough. This week, I talked with four women who know the Congressional Women’s Softball Game from very different angles — Senator Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) and Emily Goodin (New York Post), team captains for the two teams and then Atalie Ebersole, President of the Congression...

I was serving as Special Assistant to Acting Governor Donald T. DiFrancesco then — his traveling aide, at his side almost every day. Some days that meant Drumthwacket, the Governor’s residence. Some days it meant the Statehouse. Some days I’d start at his home in Scotch Plains instead. You didn’t know which until you knew. That morning it was Drumthwacket. I parked and walked into the command cent...

Five weeks ago, I started talking to the team at the The Cook Political Report , one analyst at a time. This week I closed it out with the one I’d saved for last on purpose: David Wasserman, senior editor and the guy whose “I’ve seen enough” has closed out election nights for over a decade. I told him going in I wouldn’t hold him to a prediction. He didn’t need the disclaimer. “The numbers have go...

Host Notes Jessica Taylor talks to more candidates, in more states, than almost anyone else in Washington — and this week, in the fourth stop of my month with the team at the The Cook Political Report , I finally got to ask her what she’s hearing that the rest of us aren’t. Her answer surprised me: data centers. Not tariffs, not immigration — data centers. She’s hearing organic, unscripted anger a...

Getting Amy Walter on this show once felt like a win. Getting her back a second time, this week, with Kathryn Hamm in the room too, felt like something else entirely — a vote of confidence I don’t take lightly. This is the third stop in my month with the team at The Cook Political Report , after conversations with House editor Erin Covey and managing editor Carrie Dann . But this one is different....

I’ve spent a long time in rooms where people talk about political race ratings like they’re handed down from on high — toss-up, lean R, safe D — as if there’s a formula somewhere spitting out certainty. Carrie Dann told me this week that she believed that too, once, from the outside. Carrie spent almost eighteen years in NBC News’ Washington bureau — an embedded campaign reporter, an editor, event...

I’ve spent a lot of election nights the same way most political junkies have — tracking ratings, refreshing results, trying to guess which seats will flip before the networks call them. What I’d never really thought about is who actually makes those ratings in the first place, or how much judgment goes into a label as simple as “toss-up.” This week I sat down with Erin Covey, who leads House race...

For five and a half years, this show has been about someone else — pulling a thread from a guest I find fascinating and following it wherever it leads. This week, for the first time, I turned the camera on myself. After a recent conversation with my business coach, I realized I had never articulated — through my lens — what connects every single person who’s ever sat across from me on this show. J...

I’ve spent years learning how to prep for interviews, testimony, TV hits — the words, the pacing, the message. What I hadn’t spent much time thinking about is the split second before any of that: the photo someone sees before they ever hear you speak. That’s exactly the space my guest this week lives in. Mira Adwell is a photographer who spent years shooting fashion editorial in Charleston before...

When you live in Washington, D.C., it’s easy to think the whole city runs on politics. But spend any time here — especially in the fall, when the Capitals and the Commanders and half a dozen other teams are all playing at once — and you realize pretty quickly that sports is what actually brings people together. That’s where my conversation with Jeff Dooley starts this week. Jeff is an editor at NO...

This week I sat down with Alyssa Rosenberg — dean of the Allbritton Journalism Institute, the organization behind NOTUS — for the third episode of our month-long NOTUS takeover series. Alyssa spent more than 20 years at the Washington Post as a reporter, editor and cultural critic before taking a buyout in 2025 and doing something most journalists would never admit to out loud: going looking for a...

Some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had on this show are the ones where I’m actually talking to a peer — someone who’s been doing this work at the same time I have, in the same city, navigating the same chaos. That’s this episode. Deirdre Walsh has been covering Capitol Hill since 2006 — CNN first, then NPR, now NOTUS, where she’s helping lead a newsroom that is genuinely doing somethi...

For the next month, The Friday Reporter is in the hands of NOTUS. If you haven’t been paying close attention to what’s happening over there, now is the time to start. In a moment when most Washington newsrooms are contracting — the Washington Post went from roughly 1,000 to 400 people in three years — NOTUS is doing the opposite. It’s attracting some of the best reporters in the business, investin...

There’s a conversation I come back to every so often in this work — the kind where you walk away thinking differently about something you assumed you understood. This week’s episode was one of those. I sat down with Chad Peace, the voter advocate and attorney behind the More Choice initiative and the Independent Voter Project. If you’ve heard of California’s top-two primary — the system where the...

When I sat down with Kasia Hatcher for the latest episode of The Friday Reporter, she described every adult as having an invisible operating system — not just what we think, but how we make sense of the world. Most leadership development, she said, works on the apps. The skills, the tools, the behaviors. What she does is go deeper: to the patterns that have been running your leadership without you...

In this episode of The Friday Reporter , Lisa Camooso Miller sits down with Matthew Cutts of Dentons for a fast-moving conversation on what’s actually happening inside Washington right now—and what corporate leaders, policymakers, and the media may be missing. While the headlines suggest gridlock and dysfunction, Cutts offers a more nuanced—and surprisingly hopeful—view: much of the real work is h...

I’ve been wanting to have Kathryn Mitchell on The Friday Reporter for a while. She’s one of those people in Washington who has earned the right to have a real opinion about one of the most consequential policy debates of our time — and she’s generous enough to explain it in terms the rest of us can understand. Kathryn spent nearly a decade in government, moving from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon to...

The Axios Takeover of The Friday Reporter wraps with one of the sharpest eyes on Democratic politics in the business. Holly Otterbein covers the 2028 presidential race for Axios — and she’s here to tell us why the race is already underway, even if most people aren’t watching yet. In this conversation, Holly breaks down the fault lines fracturing the Democratic Party right now: it’s not just progre...

Madison Mills covers AI for Axios — but she came to the beat from Wall Street, and that changes everything about what she’s looking for. She spent years covering markets, interviewing Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio, and building one of the most-read financial newsletters in the country. She knows how investors think, how they hedge, and how wide the gap is between what they say publicly and what they a...