As part of Roll Call’s 70th anniversary, we’ve asked several notable alumni to reflect on their time working for the paper. We’ll run these columns throughout the summer.

I knew things were different once I realized that Elliot in the Morning, the region’s leading shock jock on DC101 FM, was broadcasting actual news, about some attacks in New York.

“Tim,” I said, having dialed the Roll Call newsroom’s leader, “what’s going on?”

“We are under attack, New York is,” Tim Curran responded. “Get to the Capitol as soon as you can.”

It was the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and — having been in Manhattan the night before for a funeral — I was running late to join Mark Preston up in the Senate Periodical Gallery as part of Roll Call’s two-person team covering the Senate. John Bresnahan was already on the House side.

Pretty soon we were all about to launch on a defining handful of years in political reporting on Congress that served as incredibly formative years for Roll Call and the industry.

By the time I got to the Capitol lawn, the building was already being evacuated, with rumors of another plane headed our way — Flight 93 would go down in western Pennsylvania — and there was no organized evacuation plan. The top four congressional leaders got whisked away to a secure location believed to be the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, but everyone else just scattered about Capitol Hill.

Preston, Bres and I staked out the U.S. Capitol Police headquarters, where some lawmakers on national security committees came to receive briefings.

By early evening we were there as most lawmakers returned to the center steps of the Capitol in a show of defiance, then they did an impromptu version of “God Bless America.”

A month later Preston would join hundreds of congressional staff on a monthslong prescription of a drug meant to combat anthrax, having been on the scene in the Hart Senate Office Building for that attack.

A 50-50 Senate had just been flipped to the Democrats by a party switch, and then the entire 2002 midterm election came about to the drumbeat of war.

The congressional votes to authorize the Iraq war framed those races — and the ensuing 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.

A freshman senator from Illinois, who usually walked to votes across Constitution Avenue cupping cigarettes inside his hand to hide his smoking habit from the public, soared from the dingy basement transition offices in early 2005 to his party’s presidential nomination in little more than three years.

With so much news and so much increased focus on the Hill, Roll Call had to grow. We went from publishing two days a week, barely paying attention to our website, to four days a week when Congress was in session and regularly breaking news digitally if we thought the competition might beat us to it.

Tim steered the ship with an incredibly steady hand, always plucking talent from places where others didn’t look. Preston and Ethan Wallison (our House Democratic beat reporter with inside knowledge of a rising star named Nancy Pelosi) came from a white-collar sweatshop known as States News Service. Bres — no one calls him John or Bresnahan, not even his mother — came from a place called Inside Washington, along with Jim VandeHei, whose 2000 departure for The Wall Street Journal opened a slot for me to also leave States and join the Roll Call team.

Erin Billings, who would go on to become Roll Call’s deputy editor, came to us from Montana. Chris Cillizza, who became a pioneering digital reporter for The Washington Post and CNN, got stolen from under the tutelage of Charlie Cook, the founder of the eponymous political handicapping news organization.

Sometimes we just made the competition jealous and they wanted to come work for us, like Brody Mullins and Susan Davis, who left National Journal’s CongressDaily publication to come to Roll Call before going on to storied careers at The Wall Street Journal and NPR, respectively.

We shied away from the obvious story of the day and wrote what others were not writing. Tim let me spend a decent amount of time in 2004 writing about lawmakers who set up nonprofit foundations as a way to soak up big-money checks they were otherwise forbidden from taking for their campaigns.

It ended with me winning the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Coverage of Congress, the first time anyone from Roll Call had ever won. Two years later Brody— who had left us for the Journal in 2004 — won the Dirksen for coverage of congressional corruption.

In a 15-year run, the Dirksen award went to someone from Roll Call or an alumnus from this shop six times.

Our success came at a cost — other competitors decided to start their own versions of this model, or they decided to steal us to work for them.

By 2007 VandeHei would help launch Politico and then, 10 years later, Axios. In 2021 Bres, having been at Politico on its launch day, helped found Punchbowl News, where everyone knows the real boss is another Roll Call alum, Anna Palmer. 

John Stanton, who looked more like a hitman than Roll Call’s Senate reporter in 2010, helped launch BuzzFeed’s first real D.C. bureau. Another Dirksen winner from Roll Call, Matt Fuller, is now helping run another news startup, NOTUS.

Curran defined that era of wonder and expansion, so in late 2006, when Politico and The Washington Post came calling for me, I kept Tim in the loop.

He knew I really wanted The Post job, so he encouraged me to take the leap. And then he admitted something: Susan Glasser, who had been Roll Call’s editor in the mid-1990s and was taking over The Post’s national desk, had just hired him to become the politics editor.

He joined me at the Post a few weeks into 2007.

Early in my Post tenure, a young Rahm Emanuel asked me to go to dinner and asked how happy I now was, hitting a career achievement.

“It’ll never be as much fun as Roll Call,” I said.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

I explained how there must have been some campaign he worked on that was smaller than a presidential or less high-profile than chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in a midterm, but it was the most formative place he worked.

“Yup, I get it,” he said.

More than 18 years later, I still feel the same way about Roll Call. It hurts to not have Tim around to laugh about those days, because he felt the same way even as he soared up The Post’s editing ranks.

We lost him in February, too young.

But his spirit lives on through dozens and dozens of reporters and editors who defined an institution of that time and shaped the future of political coverage in Washington.

 Paul Kane started at Roll Call in 2000, focusing on covering the Senate. He won the Everett McKinley Dirksen Awards for Distinguished Coverage of Congress in 2004. He left in 2007 for the Washington Post. Now a senior congressional correspondent, Kane worked with reporting teams in 2021 and 2023 that won the Pulitzer Prize.