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.

If I’m being honest about my time at Roll Call, what I remember most is not having the most fun at the best job of my life or breaking big stories or even being forced to cover the Congressional Baseball Game, where some of the least athletic people on Earth find themselves totally out of depth on a professional baseball diamond and completely at home being wholly corporately sponsored. Although I did do all those things.

No, what I remember most are the layoffs.

When I was at Roll Call between 2011 and 2014, we were owned by The Economist Group. Roll Call was making money, but not enough money, according to our British bosses. At the beginning of each fiscal year, we lived out an Agatha Christie-like simulation that has become bleakly standard in newsrooms across the country, where journalists are working hard on the beat one day and gone the next. At the time, the door to our award-winning photography team’s office had pictures of every staffer taped to it. And red “X”s drawn in ink through the faces of each who had been let go.

The year before I came to Roll Call, the Supreme Court had granted corporations personhood and dispensed with limits on political spending. In a post-Citizen’s United world, virtually overnight, it seemed like there was unlimited money for literally everything in politics, except for the industry and hardworking reporters whose purpose was to hold politicians into account.

It crushed me at the time, but it is worth revisiting now, especially as the staff at The Washington Post — the so-called “big leagues” to Roll Call’s farm system — once believed to be untouchable, is being decimated by a billionaire owner. If there is a universal truth about mainstream media in the 21st century, it’s that mainstream media owners do not understand the value of journalism, public service or government. Or, more cynically, they do understand it but choose to destroy that value anyway.

I bring this up not to spoil the party — although I guess if you ask my former co-workers, spoiling a party is a Shiner Special — but to help shed light on why Roll Call, as an idea and institution, has mattered since the day it was founded in 1955. And why Roll Call will matter until the republic’s dying day. (Who knows? We could fold that into the 70^th anniversary coverage, too!)

Ten years ago, when I was asked to share my recollections of Roll Call for its 60th anniversary, I was still a daily working journalist. Donald Trump had not yet been elected president. Twice. The Capitol had not yet been attacked on Jan. 6, 2021, in a violent attempt to overthrow the government I cared about so much I chose to spend the entirety of my 20s (and I mean every waking minute) covering it from that very building.

I had not yet had to grapple with the idea of Roll Call as the newspaper of Capitol Hill now, at a time when members of Congress have abdicated their Article I constitutional responsibility to be a co-equal branch of government, checking the executive, maintaining government agencies and initiatives they already authorized and appropriated for as part of its core obligation to the public.

At this point in my life, remembering my time at Roll Call is trying to remember Congress itself.

I came to Roll Call from Politico in the summer of 2011, in the middle of the Republican exercise in hostage-taking of the full faith and credit of the United States and of cutthroat competitive reporting on what ultimately would become the Budget Control Act of 2011, a law that averted a default on the national debt but slashed many vital government programs in the process.

What my colleagues and I chronicled then — the rise of anti-government extremists on one side and norms-driven bipartisan strivers on the other — was the beginning of the times we’re living in now. And the times are … challenging. It would be easy to throw up your hands and give in to the massive amount of inertia that is the conjoined failings of our federal government and national media.

But what I want you to know is that giving up in the face of challenge is antithetical to the values that created Roll Call, sustained it through the rise of the internet and well-financed competition, and keeps a copy of its print edition in every congressional office to this day.

To work at Roll Call, to read Roll Call and to love Roll Call is to state plainly that Congress matters, that in-depth coverage of the community and impact of Capitol Hill matters, and that journalism’s persistence through one of the most trying times in our nation’s history matters.

When the rioters came on Jan. 6, 2021, to the Capitol building, the office for many Roll Callers past and present, and etched “Murder the Media” into a set of its historic doors, it was the most blatant and literal threat to Capitol Hill journalism of my lifetime.

But we should be wary of the more “polite” threats too. The people who believe journalism should only be viewed through the lens of profits, who prioritize staff reductions and clickbait over the kind of news that has the power to inform the public, shape opinion and, yes, even save lives.

Covering Congress for Roll Call was without a doubt one of the greatest privileges and loves of my life. So for her 70th anniversary, I hope you will join me in raising a glass to remind ourselves why so many talented reporters found a home at Roll Call and what we all believe in our hearts: Roll Call forever.

Meredith Shiner covered congressional leadership for Roll Call from 2011-2014. She is currently a writer and communications strategist based in Chicago, and also serves as a contributing editor to The New Republic and a lecturer in public policy at the University of Chicago.