In early February, I wrote a column suggesting that someone needed to create a rival newspaper for the nation’s capital to the shameful remnant of The Washington Post, which has been pillaged by Jeff Bezos as tribute to Donald Trump. I mentioned The Baltimore Banner as a rough role model.
The Banner was created from scratch in 2022 by Stewart W. Bainum Jr., a businessman and philanthropist, after the legacy Baltimore Sun was hollowed out by its private equity owners. The paper won a Pulitzer in 2025 for its coverage of drug overdoses. It already has about 55,000 paid subscribers and a staff of 125.
Now, Robert Allbritton, founder and former owner of Politico, has announced that he will be launching a Washington news entity to compete with the Post, sort of.
Allbritton has ink in his veins. In the 1970s, his father, Joe Allbritton, purchased the now defunct Washington Evening Star. The Star, once the dominant paper in the capital, was driven out of business during the Post’s glory days, after Allbritton sold it to Time, Inc., in 1978. Some are already referring to the new project as Joe Allbritton’s revenge.
Will the latest Allbritton venture be a newspaper? Not really.
Allbritton’s plan is to expand the site that he created after selling Politico to Germany’s Axel Springer in 2022 for about a billion dollars. That site, NOTUS, a bad pun that supposedly stands for News of the United States, is a kind of remake of Politico, which is what Allbritton knows how to do.
NOTUS, with a newsroom staff of about 50, has broken some good stories. Allbritton says he plans to double that. Reportedly, he will soon change the name to the Washington Sun and has been aggressively recruiting refugees from what’s left of the Post. This week, he snagged some of the best, including Dana Milbank and Jeff Stein.
In a memo to NOTUS staff, Allbritton wrote, “We will dramatically expand our coverage of national politics … and we’ll add a team of reporters who will cover local news.” But Allbritton added this disclaimer: “We want to be clear. We are not trying to replicate what The Washington Post was or is today. We are not trying to be a daily newspaper. We are not trying to cover the suburbs or the DMV.” Ouch.
So what sort of creature is this? Basically, it’s more a rival to the subscription-only Politico Pro than to The Washington Post.
Even the stripped-down Post has a staff of around 500; and despite its appalling editorial and op-ed output, its news reporting is still worth reading. Politico has a staff of about 700 in North America and nearly 400 in Europe.
Allbritton’s proposed staff of 100 will make the Sun more like a niche competitor. It will give the Post’s political coverage a run for its money, while The Baltimore Banner increases its coverage of the D.C. suburbs that don’t interest Allbritton.
Still, at a time when other media are capitulating to Trump, we should welcome Allbritton’s new venture to the fray, as a news organization in no way beholden to Trump or intimidated by him. But we should not mistake it as a replacement for the old, splendid, full-service Post.
It would be unfortunate if Allbritton took up a space that might be occupied by a real newspaper for the nation’s capital—and wonderful if his project served to energize efforts to create one.
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