The Scoop
One of Washington, DC’s biggest media investors plans to revive one of the US capital’s great historic rivalries with a direct attack on the limping Washington Post.
Robert Allbritton, who founded Politico and NOTUS and whose father owned the Post rival Washington Star, has discussed taking advantage of the Post’s large-scale layoffs and damaged brand by significantly expanding NOTUS, a public-spirited and education-oriented source of government coverage, into a full-scale news operation, potentially even under a different name, three people with direct knowledge of the conversations said.
NOTUS Media in February filed an application to trademark a new name — The Washington Sun — according to filings.
The Politico founder and NOTUS editor-in-chief Tim Grieve have aggressively privately pursued many of the top remaining names at the Post, hoping to peel off a significant number of top journalists to help the publication become an immediate player in DC.
Allbritton and Grieve have approached senior congressional correspondent Paul Kane, White House bureau chief Matt Viser, chief economics correspondent Jeff Stein, tech reporter Drew Harwell, White House reporter Dan Diamond, and columnist Carolyn Hax, among others.
The publication could replicate some of the success of Politico by launching an events and pricey subscription business. The DC billionaire — his family owned and sold Riggs Bank and WJLA, as well as selling Politico for about $1 billion to Axel Springer in 2021 — has told people that he is willing to invest a significant amount of money on the venture for years in order to stand up the publication.
The move is in its early stages, and one person close to the situation said the plans are fluid, including the name change. Reached by phone, Allbritton declined to comment.
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Allbritton’s move would be the latest act in a generational Washington rivalry.
While NOTUS has operated in DC largely as a proving ground for young up-and-coming journalists and a resource for cash-strapped media organizations around the country, its founder has demonstrated privately that he has grander aspirations for the publication. Before launching NOTUS, Allbritton briefly looked into buying the trademark for the Washington Star, a once-great afternoon newspaper that his father, Joseph Allbritton, bought and ran in 1975 for a short-lived assault on the Post. Robert Allbritton’s 2007 launch of Politico was viewed at the time as an echo of his father’s ambitious, thwarted run at the Post, which was owned by another prominent local family, the Grahams. That purchase became entangled in federal cross-ownership regulations and the publication struggled before being sold to Time Inc.
The Washington Star gave a generation of prominent Washington journalists their start, but is now remembered in large part as the home of the columnist Mary McGrory, a definitive chronicler of the Kennedy years, Nixon enemy, and Vietnam war critic. Joseph Allbritton sold the paper to Time, Inc. in 1978 and it ceased publishing the next year.
The expansion of NOTUS would be the latest encroachment by local and national media organizations into the space vacated by the Post in Washington. After the Post announced it was gutting its sports section, the Athletic hired half a dozen Washington-focused reporters from the paper. The Baltimore Banner similarly announced it was expanding its coverage further into the Washington, D.C. suburbs.