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 NOTUS, where he’s building a local news operation from scratch — covering DC sports, food, news, and arts and culture. He grew up in Falls Church, Virginia, where reading the Washington Post sports section gave him his first love of journalism. And now he’s helping build the kind of coverage he grew up with, for a city that is hungry for exactly that.

We talked about the Nationals this season — a team where fans, after years of a pretty aimless rebuild, finally have a reason to care again. We talked about the Commanders, the RFK site, and a new ownership group that’s making real investments that players and fans are actually noticing. And we talked about the bigger thing underneath all of it: the way local sports coverage is part of what holds a community together.

“To understand sports is to understand life and to understand human nature and decision making,” Jeff told me. I’ve been turning that line over ever since we recorded.

Jeff also gave listeners a preview of something I’m genuinely excited about: NOTUS is launching a free local newsletter at the end of July — delivered to your inbox every morning, covering DC news, sports, food, and more. You can sign up now on any article page at notus.org, and I’ve included the link in the show notes.

This is the final episode of our month-long NOTUS takeover of The Friday Reporter — and it’s been one of my favorite months of conversations in a long time. From Kadia and Paul to Deirdre to Jeff, every guest reminded me of what great journalism looks like when people actually care about the community they’re covering.

I’m so grateful to everyone at NOTUS for making this happen. And I’m grateful, as always, to you for listening.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.

— Lisa

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 good pirate ship to join.She found one. And our conversation ranged across the entire landscape of what journalism is becoming — the skills young reporters need now that didn’t exist when we started out, what breaks when a news organization violates the implicit compact with its readers, why politics has become just another entertainment fandom, and what the next five years might actually look like.I’ll be honest: I came in with a theory I’d been testing — that the loss of local journalism is driving the nationalization of politics. Alyssa pushed back on it, and she was right. The parties themselves are driving a lot of that conformity. Having someone challenge a premise that carefully, with that much context from inside the industry, is exactly what I love about these conversations.Three moments I keep coming back to:

“There are so few pathways for young people to come to D.C. and to do so especially if they don’t have family money, if they can’t afford to sort of take a risk.”

“Our politics have become sort of yet another fandom, yet another entertainment arena. And I don’t think that’s particularly healthy from a civic perspective.”

“The ability to go out and find facts in the real world is going to end up being more valuable than ever.”

TAKEAWAY

In a media moment full of doom and gloom, Alyssa’s clearest argument is an optimistic one: the same tools that have destabilized the old journalism business model are about to unlock a generation of journalists whose instincts were never fully matched by the platforms available to them. The nerds are coming — and they’re going to be incredible.

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 something different. I’ve known Deirdre for years, and this is one of those conversations where I kept thinking: more people should hear this.

We got into a lot of things. How being a parent changed the stories she pitched — when Congress was debating a social media bill and she was simultaneously fighting her teenager about Discord, she knew that story from the inside in a way no briefing book could give her. The camaraderie of the Capitol Hill press corps — the informal COVID pool, the shared files, the reporter-to-reporter trust that outsiders almost never see. The shrinking number of members she can trust not to spin her, and why that matters more than it might seem.

And a few things that surprised even me. There is a pickleball court on the fifth floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Ted Cruz plays basketball there. Kirsten Gillibrand plays tennis. The Pickleball Caucus has converted it twice a week. I did not know this.

But the story I keep thinking about is the STOCK Act loophole she cracked in 2012. She covered the bill for months. A source offhandedly mentioned that the House and Senate were interpreting the rules differently. She started pulling on that thread with her colleague Dana Bash. What they found: one chamber’s interpretation let congressional spouses trade on insider knowledge without ever having to disclose it. They reported it. Congress closed the loophole a few days later. “You always dream of making Congress react to your reporting,” she said. That’s the dream and she lived it.

The advice she carries from her first job — watching Judy Woodruff prepare — is simple: do the work you can control. Be ready. Then adjust.

That one lands.