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When Byron Tau came up through Politico, I was part of his mentorship program. I want to say, for the record, that I’m fairly certain he needed it a lot less than the program assumed he did.

Byron was one of the most confident young reporters I have ever been around. He just seemed to know how to get whatever he needed. And if he couldn’t get it directly, he’d talk his way around it until he did. Young, brash, funny — and with Jennifer Epstein beside him on the White House team, the two of them bickered like siblings and produced like veterans. Being part of that newsroom dynamic was genuinely one of the pleasures of my life on that beat.

I’ve always felt a sense of pride watching him go from that Politico desk to the Wall Street Journal, to NOTUS, and now published author and investigative reporter for the Associated Press. This spring, Byron was part of an AP team that collected the Pulitzer Prize for a global investigation into surveillance tools built in Silicon Valley, refined in China, and quietly brought back home for secret use by the U.S. Border Patrol. The citation called it astonishing. It was.

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Before all of that, Byron waited tables at the Cheesecake Factory on Wisconsin Avenue for nearly two years — getting his master’s degree, collecting internships at Roll Call, the New Republic, the National Journal’s Hotline — working his way toward a job that didn’t exist yet in a city that wasn’t ready to hire him. That’s the origin story. He got to Politico, got under Ben Smith’s wing, learned to be fast, learned to monitor everything, learned how a well-regarded reporter manages sources without getting spun. And then he was off.

In this episode, we talk about what it was like to cover Barack Obama as a 26-year-old with a White House credential and the nerve to use it. We talk about the surveillance reporting — how it started with a tip about the border region, how it built through litigation records and a motorist from Houston who’d filed a lawsuit, how the Border Patrol all but confirmed the story before it ran. We talk about mentorship, and Byron is honest about it: the stubborn streak, the self-made impulse, the things he might have taken more of if he hadn’t been so determined to figure it out alone. “You were always there as a resource,” he told me. “I probably could have just used you a little bit more.”

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I’ll take it.

And then I asked him what a Pulitzer actually changes.

“The work is still the work,” he said. “Prizes are nice, but it’s not the reason we do this. The reason we do this is to tell stories that are important to the public and to hold powerful institutions accountable when they let down the people they’re supposed to serve.”

I didn’t teach him that. But I’m glad he knows it.

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We close with Current Events — the segment where guests quiz me on the week’s news, knowing full well I’ve gone from consuming everything to reading the print Washington Post and whatever I overhear during the day. Seth Kaplan got me. Neetzan got me. Byron had the decency to go local.

Guests lead, three to nothing.

Press play.

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This is one of those journalism stories that feels like magic. Spoilers: it wasn’t. But it does involve Disney World.

Cut to December 2025. My wife and I are on a Florida vacation, and Disney World is a must. I hadn’t been to Orlando in 32 years since my high school senior year, back when the Sunshine State had a weird tradition of letting graduating seniors roam the Magic Kingdom overnight. Now, as childless Gen X politics and policy nerds, we were genuinely pumped for the Hall of Presidents. Bonus: there was no line.

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Inside the dark, air-conditioned theater, I felt a wave of patriotism watching the historical film before the curtains rose on the animatronic, Chuck E. Cheese-style presidential robots. But my patriotism turned into professional pride when I heard one specific line - a quote I had a direct hand in making happen.

If you aren’t paying close attention, you might miss it. Right before the robot roll call, a montage of recent presidents’ voices echoes through the theater with their most famous soundbites. You hear JFK’s “ask not,” Reagan’s “tear down this wall,” and George W. Bush’s post-9/11 bullhorn speech.

Last is Barack Obama, whose entire eight-year term boiled down to this:

“Loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America.”

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The nation’s first Black president didn’t just pull those words out of thin air when he delivered his historic Selma speech marking 50 years since Bloody Sunday. And that is where I come in.

Let’s rewind to February 2015 on a brisk Ash Wednesday in New York City. I was on assignment for Politico Magazine, writing a profile on conservative economist Stephen Moore. My editors wanted a piece on the policy wonks trying to land jobs with the emerging 2016 GOP presidential candidates.

That night, I tagged along with Moore to an exclusive dinner at the 21 Club that he was co-hosting. About 60 right-leaning executives and conservative media types packed the room to hear from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker - then a GOP frontrunner. But the night took a wildly dramatic turn thanks to a late-minute addition: Rudy Giuliani.

Without warning, the former New York mayor crashed the private second-floor room and took the mic. My tape recorder was running as he meandered through topics before taking a sharp turn into Obama’s patriotism.

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

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Remember, this was early 2015. Donald Trump hadn’t even ridden his golden escalator yet. Outright questioning a sitting president’s love for his country was a massive story. My 593-word scoop went viral overnight. By morning, Giuliani was defending himself on Fox News, and literally everyone in politics was weighing in. Saturday Night Live even used it for their Cold Open.

I thought that was the end of it.

Fast forward to 2023. An Obama spokesperson told me I needed to read Grace, a memoir by former White House speechwriter Cody Keenan. In it, I finally learned what happened behind the scenes six weeks after my scoop dropped.

Keenan was struggling to find the right emotional anchor for Obama’s upcoming speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. When a late-winter snowstorm shut down D.C., Keenan found himself trapped in the White House with rare, unfettered access to the president.

In a 2023 interview on The love, journalism Show, Keenan explained his secret weapon for inspiring the boss: “I always found that a good way to kind of shake loose some emotion from him is to get him all hopped up on, you know, whatever the political idiocy of the day was.”

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Enter my Politico article.

According to the book, Obama initially brushed it off: “Who gives a fuck what Rudy Giuliani has to say?” But then, the bait clicked. “But it does offer an idea worth taking on,” Obama added.

Which brings us right back to Disney World.

Obama’s Selma speech lasted over 30 minutes, and he later called it one of the most important addresses of his presidency. It’s so big, in fact, that the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago that opens on Friday has other pieces of that massive Selma speech engraved in stone on the building’s facade overlooking the Windy City and Lake Michigan.

Back in central Florida, out of all the words Obama spoke in Selma, Disney’s curators chose the exact line he wrote to rebuke Rudy Giuliani and the conservative media machine. It’s been playing on loop in the attraction through Trump 1.0, Joe Biden, and now Trump 2.0. A long-forgotten news cycle lives on.

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The first thing I heard was a garbled bark. I couldn't tell if he was yelling at a source, a colleague or his computer. I walked through the glass doors on Day 1 at USA TODAY and there he was — hunched behind his desk, head so low I could only see the top of his white hair over the monitor. That was my introduction to DJ.

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He was on everything after that. He wanted to be the lead reporter on every story. We had to give other people opportunities — that was the job — but he was there on the Trump guilty verdict, there on the Saturday when Trump was shot, shouting to our newsroom before most people had even picked their phones up. “Somethiung has happened in Pa …. shots maybe.” That was DJ — first, fast, and fully himself.

A few weeks in, I had him and a couple of other reporters over to our house for a barbecue. We hit it off over his South Carolina connection with my wife. That was when I started to see him past the bark. The person underneath it.

My job after that was often trying to get him to slow down. Stop filing into the evening. He didn’t need to cover every rally. He’d seen his share, more than his share, every president from Clinton to Trump. He sometimes heard me. He’d go home. Sometimes he’d just walk around the block, perhaps waiting me out.

When he retired in January 2025, he told me we’d see each other down the roads. I wrote back that I was sure we would. And we did — drinks at PJ Clarke’s, a Christmas party, him telling me about the travels he was finally getting to take.

Last September, I checked in and got a reply back: “OK - waiting for the rain to stop at Nats Park.”

December 2, 2025. 11:25 p.m. I texted him: “Great to see you last night! We missed you for the Cheney funeral. Enjoy your next trip.” He read it the next morning.

It was our last exchange.

David Jackson died April 22, 2026. He was 66. He covered the White House for USA TODAY for more than two decades. He was curmudgeonly and rumpled and relentless, and once he trusted you, all of that melted. I was his last editor. I didn’t try to change him. I just tried to keep up.

Godspeed, my friend. We’ll see each other down the roads.

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I kept a journal through most of my year in Japan. 1997 into 1998. Teaching English for NOVA, living in Urawa, commuting twelve stations each way to Kumagaya.

Some entries are about the work. Some are about a girlfriend back in the States. Some are just — watching. A park. A Saturday. The wind.

This one is from July 18, 1998. I was 23. I’d been trying to quit smoking.

—

July 18, 1998 · Kita Urawa Park

The heavy wind blew sand in the air and caused mild havoc for several of the picnickers. As beverages added new flavors to the earth’s surface and moms chased runaway napkins instead of children, one mommy and daughter walked through the park on an easy late Saturday stroll.

They had been shopping, you’d imagine, because the young girl — maybe six, judging by height — carried two department store bags slung in her right arm behind her neck. As if she was trying a new triceps weight exercise or scratching the back of her left shoulder.

Her mom, a seasoned veteran in such maneuvers, walked in the same manner with her orange leather purse in her right hand. Daughter had watched mom do this. Emulating her seemed second nature.

Many more folks crossed the same path. The wind died down. A young twenties man sat against a tree contemplating everything in the midst of his 16th hour without a cigarette.

— Darren Samuelsohn, Japan, 1998

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love, journalism runs on passion. It always has. But if these dispatches mean something to you — if you want to keep the archive coming, keep the show going, keep the whole thing alive — there’s a paid tier. I’m not asking for a lot. Just enough to know this matters to more than just me.

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Neetzan Zimmerman stayed on camera for another 30 minutes after we wrapped the main episode — and said something a lot of people in journalism know but won’t say out loud: “People like to read low as much as they like to read high. The answer is to have both.”

The former editor of the internet argues the media industry didn’t fail because audiences wanted trash. It failed because the people who took over stopped believing in the high entirely. “We’ve done away with the high completely, because the people who have taken over are only interested in the low. And that’s where we ended up.”

He also reflects on what it means now to traffic in paperbacks, vinyl, and VHS at The Newsagent’s after years of engineering virality online.

“Spending time with something means developing a relationship with it, developing feelings towards it,” he said. “I think we are losing something when we can’t spend the time to really appreciate the culture we’re consuming these days.”

The paid section of our chat is where it gets personal — what it meant to be genuinely great at a job that eventually breaks you, and what he said when I asked if journalism loved him back.

The first 15 minutes are free. The rest is for paid subscribers. It’s worth it.

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Neetzan Zimmerman — for paid subscribers

What it cost him, and what he said when I asked if journalism loved him back

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The last time Neetzan Zimmerman was on The love, journalism Show, The Messenger was collapsing around us in real time. That was February 2024. He was one of the last guests I had before the show went quiet for two years.

A lot has happened since then.

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Neetzan was once known as the Editor of the Internet — literally, that was his title at Gawker. He had a gift for understanding what people would click on before they knew it themselves. In November 2013, his posts alone drove 17.3 million unique visitors to Gawker. More than every other writer on staff combined.

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Today he and his wife Yulia Shamis run The Newsagent’s — a bookshop, coffee bar, and event space at 228 Fayetteville Street in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Used paperbacks. Vinyl. VHS tapes. Vintage magazines. No Wi-Fi. No Google. No notifications. Just artifacts and the people who love them.

He put it this way: “The internet is everything now. The goal is to log off. Where is the exit?”

The Newsagent’s is his answer.

We talked about The Messenger’s collapse, the move to Raleigh, his store’s quirks, what he misses about journalism, and whether he’d ever come back. We also played a game — I’ll let you find that part yourself.

This is exactly the kind of love, journalism story this show was built for.

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My workstation at the end looked like this: three monitors including my laptop. Inside each monitor, more tabs than I could count. Teams active at all hours. Email loaded with Reuters alerts on every Trump mention. A five-column TweetDeck. A four-screen Google TV live news feed on my iPad. My phone for when the computers slowed down.

Then it all stopped.

I never had a job like my last one. As my role expanded — ultimately to include the White House — so did everything that came with it. The screens weren’t vanity. They were the job. Managing a team chasing the biggest story in the country means you need the full view, all the time. Pirate ship. Flying the Millennium Falcon. Offensive coordinator. I’ve used all three metaphors to describe what it felt like from the inside.

White House editor is one of the hardest jobs in Washington. The next deadline never stops. The competition never sleeps. The algorithms don’t care how tired you are. I’d done versions of it before as a reporter — at Politico, during the 2012 campaign, the Mueller investigation, the first impeachment. That stretch put me in the hospital. I came back. I got better. Then I did it again.

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I found the right help. I wish I’d asked for it sooner.

Still — the fire shrunk. That’s the only way I know how to say it. The fire to chase the story, to be in the middle of it all, every day, all the time. It got quieter. My body said park it. Get off the screens. Get off the news. And this time I listened.

The detox was real. Twitter gone. Facebook gone. News intake reduced to something that would have looked familiar to a person from 1995 — reading the actual print newspaper. A newsman going back to newsprint.

What followed was something I’m still taking stock of. Daily journaling. Naps. Rest. Untangling the garden hose, which is what I call the slow work of getting your head and body back. A family cruise with more than two dozen people — three generations, custom shirts and hats. Then Scotland. Thirteen rounds of golf at twelve courses over three weeks. I learned about the shooting at the White House correspondents dinner the following morning, from a friend in Missouri.

Japan is coming. The first time back since 1998.

I’ve been reading old journals. Decades of them. Young Darren moves in the right directions but doesn’t know so many things yet. The value of rest. How to maintain health. How to nurture the relationships that matter. Reading him now, knowing how it all turned out, is something I don’t have all the words for yet.

What I do have is this: three years ago, journalism fired me. And I named this thing love, journalism anyway. At the time I thought I was being defiant. Now I think I was being accurate.

Journalism loved me back. Like any relationship though — it was on its own terms.

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Journalists often describe themselves as soldiers or first responders. I go with pirates.

I like to think of my teams covering elections and governing cycles like the journeys they are: navigating open waters with an eye out for trouble and treasure and where often the best stories that we most prize involve some form of pirating.

September 2015. Vice President Joe Biden taped an emotional interview with Stephen Colbert - grief over Beau, Obama wanting Hillary, and Donald Trump, C’mon Man. The whole thing was pre-taped and embargoed until air. Standard stuff. A pool report would go out for everyone to see at 11:35 p.m., followed by news articles on the internet.

Then Edward-Isaac Dovere, my Politico colleague, came in through the side door.

He hadn’t traveled with Biden. He wasn’t in the pool. He had no embargo stopping him. He’d stood in the audience line and went in via the public entrance with everyone else. He had the scoop on Colbert pleading with the vice president to run for the White House that fall and Biden begging off by talking about his late son who’d died four months earlier at 46.

The next day in the Politico newsroom, Glenn Thrush paraded through the cubicles and planted a mini-Jolly Roger flag on Dovere’s desk.

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After Politico, at my next newsroom running Insider’s DC bureau, I would use the pirate ship metaphor to urge my reporters to go find the booty on their beats.

They scored by documenting the rise of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz in the US House; the ethical morass of congressional stock transactions, the gerontocracy of American politics and even the lurking chaos inside the Democratic party if Joe Biden were to ever not run again in 2024.

Nothing was easy during a global pandemic and since my team was a start-up, we were also building our boat from scratch once it’d already left port.

About a year into the job, I bought a Jolly Roger flag and had planned to display it in our bureau. But I hesitated and didn’t. The office often sat empty. It’d taken weeks to get a TV up with Sling or whatever passed for cable. I was also worried I might offend someone by promoting the work of real live pirates.

Before I could make up my mind management tossed me overboard. One of my reporters had to fish the flag from my desk drawer and bring it to my home in a tote bag stuffed alongside a mostly full bottle of bourbon and a photograph of me and my wife at the Grand Canyon that my about-to-die aunt had made for me off Shutterstock just a couple years earlier.

Later, at USA TODAY, the flag made its debut when a colleague had eye surgery and came to work with a patch. The next morning it was over my shoulder during our team video meetings.

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Last Saturday, The love, journalism Show made its return after a two-year hiatus. Substack now allows for live video, so I flew the pirate flag in the background with Isaac and Glenn and my Insider and USA TODAY colleagues all in mind.

My guest also couldn’t have been more appropriate: Seth Kaplan - one of my oldest journalism co-conspirators, a guy I’ve known since we were both working on our middle school newspaper in 6th grade at Ramblewood Middle School in Coral Springs, Florida.

Our mascot was the Raiders so the teacher named it The Jolly Roger.

During the pandemic, Seth pulled off a move that would make pirates proud. As the world was shutting down, he returned to TV news and moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in search of his next story to tell.

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In April 2024 I became Congress and campaigns editor at USA Today. America was about to vote. I was in for a wild ride.

The first day of a new job has a way of making you feel like a kid who snuck backstage.

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Hanging in the breakroom on Day 1: a fake front page from a movie about a guy who couldn’t stop looking backward. I took that as a sign.

View out the DC bureau’s window. Down that alley: a WeWork on the old Washington Post site, where The Messenger had once been. Three chapters of journalism in one sightline. I’d just started the third.

The first former American president convicted of a felony. Thirty-four counts. David Jackson, aka DJ, had the print byline. He’d been covering the White House since Bill Clinton. He passed away in April 2026. I was his final editor.

Washington has a way of putting the stakes right there on the pavement, in 35-foot letters, just in case you forgot what you were covering.

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The Republicans came to Milwaukee in the summer. Fonzie was already there.

From up here you could see the whole thing at once: the spectacle, the cameras pointed at the spectacle, and the people typing about the spectacle.

A coffee mug with his mugshot. A photograph of the assassination attempt, matted and ready to frame. America, open for business.

Two weeks after Milwaukee, Chicago. Different party, same assignment (in one of my hometowns!). The lake didn't have an opinion either way.

She dressed for the occasion. The sash told the whole story.

Susan Page has interviewed the past 10 presidents. This was the last one’s final conversation in office with a newspaper reporter.

Frank E. Gannett, founder and chief executive officer. We had some things to discuss.

The box is on the floor. The nameplate is still on the divider. The skyline hasn't moved. Some mornings it's hard to tell if you're arriving or leaving, so you take a picture either way.

Seth Kaplan and I go back to 1988. Same middle school journalism class in Coral Springs, Florida. Same student newspaper — the Jolly Roger. Thirty-seven years later, we’re both still in the business, still asking questions, still trying to figure out what this industry we love means in 2026

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We talk about the origin story, the long road through local TV news markets, what it means to leave journalism and come back around, and what the craft looks like from where we’re both standing now.

Also: bar mitzvah pictures.

Welcome back to the love, journalism Show.

Tomorrow, 11am — right after your Saturday morning cartoons.

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My guest shares my South Florida roots, survived local TV news markets, and got out of the business entirely for a bit. We’ll talk about all of it.

HOW TO WATCH/LISTEN: Subscribe if you haven’t already and you’ll get another email like this when we go live with a link to tune in.

Can’t make it at 11? A recording will be available after the show - and the link will also be found here and on my site.

Bonus: bar mitzvah pictures

For the past two years, my life was a blur of breaking news alerts and the relentless machinery of national power. Leading the teams at USA TODAY was a sprint through an era being rewritten in real-time. It was essential, exhausting, and—to be honest—deafening.

But after 30+ years in this business—from analog football scrimmages to the digital trenches of Politico and Insider—I’ve realized something: The faster the news moves, the more we need a place to slow down.

I’m coming home to love, journalism.

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I left the newsroom this month with a notebook full of the kind of questions the daily cycle doesn’t give you time to answer:

• How do we protect the craft when the noise is at a deafening pitch?

• How do we lead through chaos without losing our humanity?

• What does it actually mean to love this industry when it feels most broken?

I’m done reacting. It’s time to start reflecting.

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Over the coming weeks, I’m turning this space into a laboratory for the future of storytelling. My goal is to pull back the curtain on why we do this work, exploring stories of adversity, the projects journalists are most proud of, and how we navigate these turbulent times.

We’ll meet newsmakers, news chasers and news lovers. We’ll dig into lessons from the trail, the quiet crises of the newsroom, and the future of the craft that has been my life’s work since before the internet was a household name.

I may be off the news cycle (again! and again!), but the conversation is just getting started.

Thanks for being here.

Hi everyone,

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Hi everyone,

It’s been a minute. Two years, to be exact.

I’m writing to share that I’ve wrapped up my chapter at USA TODAY, where I’ve led our White House, Congress, and campaigns coverage through one of the most volatile stretches in modern history.

It was an incredible sprint, but I’m ready to trade the 24/7 news cycle for something a bit more... human.

I’m coming back to love, journalism. In the next few days, I’ll be sending over a deeper look at what I’m building here, but for now, I just wanted to say hello and let you know that the “shenanigans” are far from over — they’re just getting a new home.

Stay tuned,
Darren

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I’m celebrating my 49th birthday on April 7 by reflecting on a two-week vacation to Spain that concluded yesterday and preparing for a new journalism job with USA Today that begins tomorrow.

What a way to kickstart my next spin around the sun as I make the final turn toward the big 5-0.

Our trip was relaxing and exciting and a wonderful way to close out a year packed with accomplishments and adversity. My wife and I consumed our share of ham, cheese and wine. We burned many of those calories aimlessly wandering on the cobblestone streets of Madrid, Salamanca, Cáceres, Seville, Arcos de la Frontera, Ronda, Granada, Toledo and many other places both big and small.

I love how soaking up ancient history in a foreign land helps to put the news cycle into perspective.

The voyage has me energized for the next chapter of my journalism career.

At USA Today, I’ll be the Congress & Campaigns editor during another important election season in America.

I couldn’t be more excited to be back in the news business after a brief bit of downtime following The Messenger’s demise. It had been a stressful period looking for work at a time when so many skilled reporters and editors are in the same situation.

I’m lucky to have this opportunity to get to work in a newsroom full of talented journalists and with the critical assignment of telling stories that matter to all Americans.

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Stay tuned to love, journalism and The love, journalism Show as I share more as my journey continues.

I can’t quite promise a regular stream of posts. The news cycle can be a beast, and I also generally try to let my team’s work speak for itself.

At the same time, my Substack has always been aimed at humanizing what journalists do by showing what goes into being a journalist. I’ll do my best to keep that up.

#30#

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Mitch McConnell’s decision earlier this week to step down from Senate GOP leadership in November sets the stage for a potential generational change in one important seat of American power.

But the possible replacements for the 82-year old Kentucky Republican aren’t exactly Gen X or Millennial. The youngest of the recent names bandied about — Sen. Steve Daines, a Donald Trump favorite from Montana — was born in 1962.

By all accounts, America remains a gerontocracy, a phenomenon that my former team of journalists at Insider gave the deep-dive treatment a few years ago in a 30-plus part project we titled ‘Red, White and Gray.’

Our series started publishing in the late summer of 2022 and continued into the early fall. I’m proud of our epic effort, led by then-deputy editor Dave Levinthal, which involved the work of 40 different people.

If you never read our articles and explored all the stunning visuals, please do.

You’ll find investigations, explanatory reporting, historic interviews, polling, data, science and for the nerds amongst us there’s even a Dungeons & Dragons-style game that demonstrates how the American system favors seniority, incumbency, age, and on occasion, a bit of wisdom.

The work is just as relevant now as it was when we reported and then released it, maybe even more so given the 2024 election looks like it’ll be a rematch between America’s two oldest presidents at the time of their inaugurations.

Joining the latest episode of The love, journalism Show to talk about the project is an all-star cast of my former colleagues.

Levinthal, now the editor-in-chief of Raw Story, discussed how our work was a bit “before its time.” When we published, not long before the 2022 midterms, he noted Biden and Trump were not quite going at it the way they do now in criticizing and ridiculing the other for being something less than a spring chicken.

Nancy Pelosi, now 83, had not yet stepped aside as House Democratic leader and been replaced by Hakeem Jeffries, who is now 53.

“And then finally it was Mitch McConnell,” Levinthal said, “who took until today to say that he was stepping down from leadership. So in a way, this is a moment to…we can pat ourselves on the back at least a little bit to say that many of them were prescient and ended up predicting kind of the state of play in politics that we're seeing.”

Also on the show: Walt Hickey, a Pulitzer Prize winner and now executive editor of the media startup Sherwood. He helped pull and then analyze the data that showed both Congress and the federal judiciary have been getting older and at a much faster rate than at any time since our country’s founding in the late 18th century.

Hickey - who is also behind the D&D game — talked on the podcast about how his efforts ultimately helped convince Dave and me to pull the trigger on going big with the entire Insider project.

A show about America’s gerontocracy wouldn’t be complete without discussing the incumbent, 81-year old president of the United States.

Nicole Gaudiano, most recently my colleague at The Messenger and a veteran of the Biden beat going back to his Senate days, unpacked her in-depth look into why “Scranton Joe” thinks he’s never too old to be president.

Kimberly Leonard, now a Politico politics reporter, shared more about her examination into how the mind of an aging president is so much different than a younger president. Now the author of Florida Playbook, Kimberly also made the point that Sunshine State Gov. Ron DeSantis, at 45, could run for president for the next 30 years and still be younger than Trump or Biden is now.

C. Ryan Barber, now a Wall Street Journal reporter covering the Justice Department and courts, talked about his story written with Camila DeChalus (now at CNN) that delved into how lifetime appointments have made the federal judiciary older than ever.

And Warren Rojas , most recently a Capitol Hill reporter for The Messenger, makes his second appearance on The love, journalism Show, this time to talk about his story that put the spotlight on Congress and what it's like working for lawmakers “whose golden years are clouded by power struggles, rumors of senility, and constant second-guessing.”

“It was a good time,” Rojas said, “and a lot of people got mad at us for writing about it.”

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Perhaps what I loved most about the series from a journalism standpoint is how everyone on the politics team got a swing at contributing.

I admit this podcast would have lasted two hours if we brought everyone in all at once, so please let me give all a shout out here for all of their efforts.

Here we go: C. Ryan Barber, Camila DeChalus, John L. Dorman, Kayla Gallagher, Nicole Gaudiano, Brent D. Griffiths, Madison Hall, Hanna King, Jake Lahut, Kimberly Leonard, Bryan Metzger, Grace Panetta, Eliza Relman, Warren Rojas, Oma Seddiq, Dave Levinthal, Walt Hickey, Rhea Mahbubani, Elvina Nawaguna, Taylor Berman, Rebecca Harrington, Sam Fellman, Skye Gould, Jenny Chang-Rodriguez, Taylor Tyson, Annie Fu, Kazi Awal, Shayanne Gal, Tien Le, Vicky Leta, Rebecca Zisser, Rachel Mendelson, Marianne Ayala, Tyle Le, Anna Kim, Havovi Cooper, Simi Sadykhov, Tanita Gaither, Amanda Howard, Victoria Gracie, Tyler Murphy, Rachel Lupton, Jensen Rubinstein, Grace Lett, Hannah Williams, Kevin Kaplan, Nick Siwek, Emma LeGault and Jonann Brady.

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My former Messenger colleagues have banded together since we all lost our jobs.

On any given day we’re sharing lengthy and encouraging text chains about someone finding work or a job interview. A Slack channel shares tips on mental health and getting a good night’s sleep.

We’ve created a new sense of community that didn’t exist when we were all busy writing and editing an endless stream of stories. It’s been a big help after the sudden end to our digital media company that had been the focus of so much intense media scrutiny.

Here on this sixth installment on The Messenger’s end, I gathered together former politics breaking news editor Geoff Rowland and three of our top reporters: Lindsey McPherson covered Congress; James LaPorta wrote about national security and defense; and Ben White, the chief Wall Street correspondent.

It’s a pretty fascinating conversation about our failed digital startup where we discuss our roles at the company, its startup culture, management issues, plus the media coverage and criticism that swirled during our company's collapse.

One more thing: Please consider donating to this GoFundMe page organized for and by ex-employees of The Messenger to help my fellow former colleagues during this uncertain period.

Our company’s nearly 300-person staff was let go on Jan. 31 without severance or healthcare of any kind.

All the funds collected from this campaign will go to help former employees cover bills, living expenses, medicine, groceries, childcare, and health insurance costs, among others.

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Rebecca Morin covered President Joe Biden’s White House for The Messenger. Lauren Morgan oversaw the photographs and other visuals that illustrated our work.

Both veteran journalists played key roles in helping build the digital news publication from scratch but after 10 months of work are now back on the job market after the company shuttered.

We talked in this episode about the many challenges in getting a media outlet started, from obtaining White House press passes to putting together an image library on everything from war to Congress and Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce.

Our journalism conversation got personal too. Rebecca offered insights on what it meant to her to cover the politics and policy of immigration as a native of a Texas border town. Lauren shared tough-love wisdom about what it takes to make it in the business, as handed down from her mother, a barrier-breaking ex-copy editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

We met to talk about our experiences with The Messenger and the future of our industry on Feb. 8, less than a week after losing our jobs. It’s a bittersweet, raw chat among recently laid-off journalists looking for their next opportunities to keep covering the news.

One more thing: Please consider donating to this GoFundMe page organized for and by ex-employees of The Messenger to help my fellow former colleagues during this uncertain period.

Our company’s nearly 300-person staff was let go on Jan. 31 without severance or healthcare of any kind.

All the funds collected from this campaign will go to help former employees cover bills, living expenses, medicine, groceries, childcare, and health insurance costs, among others.

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Editor Mary Papenfuss and reporter Warren Rojas had long journalism careers before The Messenger.

That’s one of the many reasons why I so enjoyed my recent conversation with them about the news outlet where we all just worked until the publication died in a very public way to begin 2024.

Leaning into their past experiences everywhere from the AP to HuffPost, Bloomberg and Insider, Mary and Warren were full of perspective on this raw moment where so many are still asking WTF just happened at our previous place of employment that had once promised to “break the news.”

We talked about the allure of joining a startup, the challenges faced in cranking out so much copy and the empty feeling that has followed knowing our publication is no longer available on the World Wide Web.

“I mean, to spend nine months creating that and getting it off the ground and where it was actually starting to coalesce into something I think pretty powerful, and then just to shut it down, to lose all of that work and money and such a shame,” Mary said.

I promise this isn’t a total downer of a show too.

Both journalist veterans shared their thoughts on the future of the media industry and dished advice to future editors and reporters who may be wondering if they’re better off getting a law degree. #30#

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We are back for another dip into what happened at The Messenger with two journalists who know what it takes to get you to click on a story.

Until last week, Neetzan Zimmerman was the company’s chief growth officer and the behind-the-scenes guru doing his thing trying to pull the strings on the internet.

Ben Smith is editor-in-chief and founder of Semafor, as well as a former New York Times media columnist and author of the book ‘Traffic: Genius, Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.’

On today’s episode of The love, journalism Show, these two former colleagues of mine (Ben and I crossed paths back at Politico) got into a lively exchange on The Messenger’s ambitious rollout, plus its wins and its losses.

Tune in as Neetzan pulls back the curtain on some of the reader metrics that the news site was generating even as the business model ultimately sank the ship. And both journalists talk at length about their views on the future of journalism and what needs to happen for the news industry to survive into the 21st century.

Enjoy.

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