Roll Call's 70th Anniversary As part of Roll Call’s 70th anniversary, we’ve asked several notable alumni to reflect on their time working for the paper. Recently, I visited the Capitol to produce footage for a documentary by the Japanese network NHK about PolitiFact, where I work as chief correspondent. The film crew had asked if they could capture video of me attending a press conference or interviewing a source in person, but I don’t do these things often for my job; most of the claims we gather for our fact checks can be found either online or on social media. So I suggested that we go to the Capitol instead. For me, the return visit to the Capitol conjured up memories of my five-year tenure at Roll Call — as deputy editor from 2004 to 2006, and as founding editor of its digital-native wire service, CongressNow, from 2007 to 2009. Most of my memories of Roll Call and CongressNow are fond. But being back on the Capitol campus and explaining my background to the documentarians reminded me of a divide I never managed to fully bridge during my time with the company — the divide between the large majority of Roll Call journalists who had spent long hours in the hallways tracking down lawmakers, and those, mainly me, who had covered Congress largely from the outside. Before Roll Call, I spent 10 years with National Journal covering Congress, electoral politics, policy and lobbying, and I had simultaneously written extensively as a freelancer for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and other outlets. I had filed at least one story from each of the lower 48 states between 1996 and 2002. I suppose this was the part of my background that convinced then-editor Tim Curran, who died in February, to recruit me as Roll Call’s deputy editor. We had met for the first time at the wedding of my old friend from National Journal, Chris Cillizza, who was then covering politics for Roll Call. But in the Roll Call context, I was an unconventional choice for a top position. I hadn’t worked my way up the ranks of Hill rats. Before I officially started in the job, I tried to get a jump by having one-on-one lunches with some of the more senior journalists on the staff, including congressional reporters Paul Kane, Mark Preston and Ben Pershing and the late investigative reporter Damon Chappie. The message from these and other staffers I met with early on was consistent: “We already know what we’re doing. We can handle ourselves just fine.” They were right: Over the years, Kane has proven himself to be one of the smartest observers of Congress anywhere; Preston and Pershing have assembled decorated careers for CNN (both of them) and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal (Pershing). Reporters like these didn’t need me to feed them story ideas, because if they ever found themselves short, they already had a pipeline from Curran, who remains the best generator of story ideas I’ve ever worked with. Inside the newsroom, I got along with everybody just fine. But I never felt I was “one of the guys” (or gals — including some of the best in the business: Emily Pierce, Erin Billings, Rachel Van Dongen, Jennifer Yachnin, Mary Ann Akers and, on the politics team, Lauren Whittington). All of us were congressional journalists but unlike everyone else, I had never paid my dues with long nights in the Capitol’s hallways. (The high-stress environment of covering Congress also produced more smokers at Roll Call than at any journalistic outlet I have worked for.) Since I couldn’t beat them with my congressional reporting background — nor, as an editor, could I belatedly join them on the front lines — I found other niches. I like to think I improved their stories as a line editor. I’m proud of my role working with Chappie and John Bresnahan on investigative projects, an experience that taught me that an investigative editor is at least as important as an investigative reporter in producing important journalism. I enjoyed editing the columns of Stu Rothenberg, Mort Kondracke, David Winston, Donna Brazile, Norm Ornstein and Don Wolfensberger. Having spent several years with National Journal as one of D.C.’s small coterie of lobbying reporters, I was given undivided responsibility for Roll Call’s lobbying coverage, and I helped hire and edit other members of that small fraternity, including Brody Mullins, Kate Ackley and Ted Goldman. Some of my favorite editing experiences came from working with staff reporters who appreciated feature writing, including Bree Hocking, Amy Keller and Suzanne Nelson. It was a pleasure to work with Roll Call’s top-notch photographers: Doug Graham, Tom Williams and Chris Maddaloni. (Apologies in advance if I neglected to mention any of my old colleagues here!) More than anything else, I found my niche at Roll Call with a sideline gig as a politics columnist. A few months after joining Roll Call, I asked Curran if I could write a column about politics in the states — elections for governor, state attorney general, secretary of state, state legislatures, ballot measures and the like. He said yes — though I still suspect he agreed only because it was the path of least resistance as he was, literally, walking out the door to begin his summer vacation. For me, it proved to be a career-changing event. Politics editor Josh Kurtz became a supporter, realizing that Roll Call didn’t already cover these topics — and other media outlets didn’t, either. So I wrote the “Out There” column once or twice a week for the next few years. Over the next two decades, it has run in (and in some cases been canceled by) Stateline.org, Governing magazine, the Cook Political Report, U.S. News & World Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball. The column is no longer called “Out There,” but it’s still alive after all this time. In late 2006, Roll Call’s executives tapped me to head up a project that would become CongressNow. The goal was to integrate Roll Call with its newly purchased, Texas-based legislative news service, GalleryWatch; the assignment was to create a wire service that covered the substantive legislative business of hearings and markups — material too down-in-the-weeds for Roll Call’s print edition. Joining me and my handpicked deputy editor, George Cahlink, were a full-time staff of about six reporters, plus the GalleryWatch staff, which included such then-junior journalists as Niels Lesniewski and Jen Bendery. In the pre-Twitter days, CongressNow broke Roll Call tradition by eschewing a paper edition; instead, we posted and emailed stories to subscribers as soon as they were edited. We were the little engine that could: By our second or third week of operation, I heard through the grapevine that, at an all-staff meeting of our massively larger rival, CQ, a CQ editor said, “You’ve probably never heard of them, but your biggest competitor right now is CongressNow.” Less than three years later, CQ merged with Roll Call, absorbing CongressNow. I never did end up serving in the Capitol trenches alongside my Roll Call colleagues, and that’s been something of a career regret. But my time at Roll Call prepared me well for my future career, including 16 years and counting with PolitiFact and as chief author of the Almanac of American Politics. Today, I edit many of the Almanac’s lawmaker profiles, I’m able to serve as PolitiFact’s in-house expert on congressional procedure, and I sometimes cosplay as a hallway reporter when taking PolitiFact interns on tours of the Capitol complex. I guess for a publication so steeped in the lore of Congress, it was inevitable that I would pick up some of it by osmosis. Louis Jacobson was deputy editor of Roll Call from 2004 to 2006 and was the founding editor of its affiliate CongressNow from 2007 to 2009. He is currently chief correspondent for PolitiFact and chief author of the Almanac of American Politics.
