When I heard the news on Sunday that Tim Curran, one of my predecessors as the top editor of Roll Call, had died, it was appropriately enough from one of his neighbors on Capitol Hill. 

For a place that is so intricately associated with Congress and political power, Capitol Hill is still a small neighborhood, albeit one where some residents make multibillion-dollar decisions about life and death. And Roll Call has always, from its founding nearly 70 years ago by Sid Yudain, been imbued with a neighborhood newspaper feel. 

Yudain, who died in 2013, was heard to say it was a death on Capitol Hill that had gone unnoticed by the national newspapers that was one of the reasons he founded Roll Call. He knew how close a community Capitol Hill was.

The first edition on June 16, 1955, with a front page that declared itself “The Newspaper of Capitol Hill,” featured stories on everything from a “Dramatic Refugee Shipment Planned” to “Hill Workers to Share In $11 Million Pay Hike” to “‘Bosses’ Due For A Ribbing” (about the Congressional Secretaries Club’s annual variety show). That mix of stories would fit right in on the front page in 2025. 

Curran and I worked at Roll Call at very different times. He started as an intern at the end of the Reagan era and made his bones as a staff writer when Washington was undergoing generational changes and entering a time of remarkable political rivalry and instability in the 1990s. He was editor at the dawn of the internet age, which pushed the economics of newspapers into turmoil. I started as an assignment editor a little over four years after he left Roll Call for The Washington Post, the beginning of the tea party era — and which has become a time in politics defined by an attack on the Capitol and constitutional crises.

Throughout, the mission has remained the same: Cover Congress and its key players, both elected and unelected; make sense of the forces around it; and never lose sight of the fact that people who work for and around the legislative branch do not exist in a vacuum. That includes the neighbors and neighborhood, from Congressional Cemetery to the Tune Inn. 

Curran was a true newshound. Over almost two decades at Roll Call he became a leader who inspired the newsroom to work hard, get the stories, and after deadline, get a beer at the Irish Times. (OK, maybe there were times when drinks got poured before everyone hit the Irish Times.)

We did not overlap at Roll Call, but we shared the stewardship of a newsroom whose influence and alumni are widespread, from Axios to The New Yorker to The Wall Street Journal, and whose readers expect that we retain the thing that makes Roll Call, well, Roll Call. 

Curran could go on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal for an early-morning media hit (via video uplink!) and be as adept at discussing not just a front-page story about how then-GOP Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island was following in his late father’s footsteps in driving Republican leaders crazy, but also why Roll Call did an April Fools’ Day edition. 

About those neighbors: It was at one of their backyard hangouts that I got to know Curran not just as a fellow editor at Roll Call but as a dude who was great to hang out with, drink a beer with, talk about books, his cat and whatever the hell else was going on around Capitol Hill. 

He was a good journalist, writer, editor and neighbor. 

More like him, please.