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.