Wonder Where All Those Washington Post Reporters Went? Meet The Washington Sun

The new digital publication has built a 110-person newsroom—including at least 28 former Washington Post journalists—while much of the news business is cutting back.

By Mary Wadland

ARLINGTON, VA—There is a rare kind of good news in the newspaper business right now: somebody is adding newsroom chairs.

Not metaphorical chairs. Actual chairs.

Tim Grieve, editor in chief of The Washington Sun, recently posted a photograph of a new shipment arriving at the newsroom.

“It’s fun to work in a newsroom where we have to keep adding chairs,” he wrote.

In 2026, that is practically poetry.

At a moment when many news organizations are cutting staff, shrinking coverage and asking fewer journalists to do more, The Washington Sun is making a conspicuously different bet. It is hiring reporters, expanding coverage and building what it says will be a broad digital publication serving both Washington and the nation.

And if you have been wondering where some of those familiar Washington Post bylines went, here is part of the answer.

According to TheWrap, longtime Post columnist Dana Milbank—who joined the Sun earlier this year—said at least 28 members of the new newsroom previously worked at the Post.

They are part of a reported 110-person newsroom, more than double the publication’s staff at the beginning of the year.

That is not a quiet launch. It is a declaration of intent.

Familiar Names, a New Newsroom

The roster includes some of Washington journalism’s best-known names: Milbank, congressional reporters Paul Kane and Kadia Goba, economics reporter Jeff Stein, restaurant critic Tom Sietsema, and sportswriters Thomas Boswell and Dave Sheinin.

The Sun has also partnered with Capital Weather, the forecasting operation previously known as the Post’s Capital Weather Gang.

For readers, that means the new publication is not simply building a politics shop. It is trying to recreate something increasingly difficult to find: a general-interest newsroom where national affairs, local government, restaurants, sports, weather and culture all live under one roof—or, in this case, on one website.

That model is ambitious. It is also expensive. But communities lose something important when the news is broken into disconnected pieces or disappears altogether.

A restaurant critic helps explain a city. A sportswriter records its shared rituals. A local reporter sits through the meeting everyone else skipped and tells readers what the decision will mean on their street.

Those beats are not extras. Together, they create a sense of place.

Not Starting From Scratch

The Washington Sun may have a new name, but its roots go back to NOTUS, which launched in January 2024 through the nonprofit Allbritton Journalism Institute.

AJI trains early-career political journalists by placing fellows inside a working newsroom. NOTUS became legally and operationally separate from the institute in late 2025, although it remains an important partner in the fellowship program.

The organization has already experimented with helping local newsrooms strengthen their Washington coverage. In 2025, AJI and NOTUS launched a Washington Bureau Initiative with outlets around the country, supported partly by a $500,000 Google News Initiative grant.

The idea was refreshingly practical: help local publications explain what their elected officials and the federal government are doing—and why readers back home should care.

The organization originally planned to rename NOTUS “The Star,” a reference to the historic Washington Star, once owned by the father of Sun backer and Politico co-founder Robert Allbritton. A trademark dispute derailed that plan.

The name changed. The ambition did not.

Why This Publisher Is Rooting for It

Milbank described the Sun as a “grand experiment” in whether a broad digital publication can make national and local journalism work together in the 21st century.

He is writing about his own employer, of course, so his assessment should be read as an opinion—not an independent verdict. But the question behind it is one every publisher should be asking.

Can a newsroom still serve readers as whole people?

Readers do not live in separate political, culinary, athletic and civic universes. They want to know what Congress did, whether tomorrow’s storm will flood their street, what happened at City Hall, where to eat Saturday night and how the local team played.

That mix is not a lack of focus. It is community life.

As the publisher of an independently owned newspaper serving Alexandria, I know how unglamorous the machinery behind good local journalism can be. It requires reporters who answer the phone, editors who ask one more question, photographers who show up in the rain, advertisers who recognize the value of a trusted audience—and readers willing to support the work.

I have already subscribed to The Washington Sun.

Not because I expect perfection on Day One. No newsroom gets everything right. I subscribed because hiring journalists, expanding coverage and taking a serious chance on the future of news deserve support.

A thriving press is not a zero-sum game. When talented journalists find new homes, overlooked stories receive attention and readers are reminded that credible reporting has value, every community that still wants to understand itself benefits.

I am rooting for The Washington Sun to succeed.

And yes, I am rooting for more chairs.

Editor’s Note: Mary Wadland is publisher and editor-in-chief of The Zebra Press, an independently owned community newspaper serving Alexandria, Virginia. This reported publisher’s column reflects her perspective as a fellow independent news publisher. The Washington Sun did not sponsor, review or influence this article.