AJI Staff
Leadership
Robert L. Allbritton
President
Robert was the founder, publisher and owner of Politico, which he sold to the German publishing firm Axel Springer in 2021. He is also executive chairman of Perpetual Capital Partners, a private middle-market investment firm based in Arlington, Virginia. A native of Houston, Robert serves on the Board of Directors of the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation and is a Trustee Emeritus of Wesleyan University.
Tim Grieve
Executive Director & Editor in Chief
Tim is the executive director of the Allbritton Journalism Institute and the editor in chief of NOTUS. He was the founding editor in chief of both Politico Pro and Protocol. Previously, he was the editor in chief of The Stanford Daily, a reporter at The Sacramento Bee, a senior writer at Salon, the congressional bureau chief and managing editor for Politico, the editor in chief of National Journal, and the Vice President of News at McClatchy, the publisher of the Miami Herald and more than two dozen other newspapers around the country.
Editors
Matt Berman
Managing Editor
Matt is the former senior politics editor for BuzzFeed News, where he oversaw reporting on the 2018 and 2020 elections and the Trump presidency. He was previously a senior editor for Politico States, focused on New York politics and policy, and assistant managing editor at National Journal.
Kate Nocera
Managing Editor
Kate is a former senior editor at Axios, where she helped oversee the breaking news team, and the former Washington bureau chief at BuzzFeed News, where she oversaw political coverage. Previously, she was a senior congressional correspondent for BuzzFeed News, and was a co-recipient of the National Press Foundation’s Dirksen award for distinguished reporting of Congress. She has worked for Politico, Politico Pro and the New York Daily News.
Richard Just
Managing Editor for Longform &
Director of Admissions
Richard is the former editor of The Washington Post Magazine, which he led to its first-ever National Magazine Award in 2020 and a National Magazine Award nomination in 2023. He is the former editor of National Journal magazine and The New Republic, both of which he led to National Magazine Award nominations. He founded the Princeton University Summer Journalism Program, which annually brings 40 high school students from low-income backgrounds to Princeton for a 10-day crash course on journalism and college admissions. He has also been a visiting journalism professor at Princeton.
Elise Foley
Senior Editor
Elise previously worked at HuffPost, where she most recently served as the copy chief after working as the deputy politics editor and deputy enterprise editor. Prior to editing, Elise covered politics and immigration policy at HuffPost, including reporting on Capitol Hill, the campaign trail and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. Elise is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Matt Fuller
Congressional Bureau Chief
Matt is the former Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast, where he oversaw the politics coverage. Before that, he reported on Congress for more than a decade at HuffPost, Roll Call and Congressional Quarterly, where he specialized in House Republicans. He was the winner of the 2015 Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for his coverage of the rise of the House Freedom Caucus, and he frequently lectures at the Georgetown Government Affairs Institute. Matt has also taught at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.
Tara Golshan
Senior Editor
Tara is a former senior editor at Vanity Fair, where she helped oversee politics, business and technology coverage for The Hive and the magazine. Previously, she was a policy and politics reporter at HuffPost, where she covered the 2020 election and Covid-19 relief legislation. Before that, she was part of Vox’s inaugural congressional team, covering Donald Trump’s agenda from Capitol Hill.
Lissandra Villa de Petrzelka
Editor
Lissa (pronounced like Lisa) reported on national politics before moving into editing. She’s covered beats including the politics of abortion in a post-Dobbs world at The Boston Globe, the 2020 presidential election at Time magazine, and campaigns and Capitol Hill at BuzzFeed News. She is a graduate of Iowa State University.
Kim Breen
Copy Chief
Kim is a former Fact Check editor at USA Today. Previously, she spent 15 years in several roles at The Dallas Morning News, including education reporter, education editor, communities editor and breaking news/enterprise editor. She started her journalism career in upstate New York as a reporter for the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
Andrew Burton
Copy Editor
Before NOTUS, Andrew did copy editing at Business Insider and fact checking for Vanity Fair. He has written freelance for publications including Rolling Stone and Hell Gate.
Reporters
Daniella Diaz
Reporter
Daniella Diaz is a congressional reporter for NOTUS, having joined from POLITICO. Before joining POLITICO in February 2023, she was a CNN congressional reporter. In 2020, she traversed the country as a CNN campaign embed covering the campaign efforts of then-Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Her coverage at CNN also has taken her to Tijuana, Mexico, to report on deported veterans, as well as to Havana for reporting on U.S.-Cuba relations. Previously, Daniella covered the 2018 midterms for CNN, focusing mainly on races in Florida, and reported on daily Hill breaking news for CNN Digital as well as breaking news on the 2016 election for CNN Politics.
Taylor Giorno
Reporter
Taylor Giorno covers lobbying and influence for NOTUS, focusing on who has influence, how they wield it and their motivations. She previously covered business and lobbying for The Hill and money in politics for OpenSecrets. An Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) member, Taylor has helped train fellow journalists to track dark money in elections and foreign influence operations.
Oriana González
Reporter
Oriana writes about the politics and policy of reproductive health, the FDA and transgender health care. She was formerly a reporter at Axios, where she led and shaped the newsroom’s coverage of abortion. Her scoops made Axios a must-read in the lead up to and aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. She was a frequent contributor to the “Axios Today” podcast and has also appeared on Scripps News, Sirius XM, Telemundo and MSNBC.
Reese Gorman
Reporter
Reese Gorman is a Politics Reporter at NOTUS covering President Donald Trump and Congress. Prior to joining NOTUS he was a politics reporter at The Daily Beast and a Congress reporter at the Washington Examiner. He got his start in journalism covering state politics in Oklahoma at The Frontier and the Norman Transcript.
Anna Kramer
Reporter
Anna Kramer covers energy and environment policy and politics. She previously covered climate change, science, and food, with stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, WIRED, the Wall Street Journal, and others, and she still writes a food newsletter. Anna is based in Washington, D.C. but remains a loyal Philadelphia sports fan.
Evan McMorris-Santoro
Reporter
Evan is a veteran journalist with career stops in print, audio and television. He was an enterprise correspondent at CNN and won an Emmy as a correspondent at Vice News. He covered the White House for BuzzFeed News, where he also co-created and hosted a podcast covering the 2016 election. He got his start in D.C. reporting at National Journal’s The Hotline and began his career in local newspapers.
Jose Pagliery
Reporter
Jose Pagliery is an investigative reporter who grew up skateboarding in suburban South Florida, where he got his start at The Miami Herald. He earned four Emmys for his bilingual on-camera work at Univision New York. In recent years, he acquired private Venmos shedding light on Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz’s sex trafficking scandal, revealed ICE’s use of controversial spy technology to hunt down undocumented immigrants, and exposed lethal manufacturing flaws in the Sig Sauer P320 pistol used by police worldwide. He has reported on every trial against Donald Trump from inside the courtroom since 2021. He welcomes tips from confidential sources—whom he fiercely protects.
Ursula Perano
Reporter
Previously with Politico, Axios and The Daily Beast.
Alex Roarty
Reporter
Alex comes to AJI from McClatchy newspapers, where he was a politics writer and White House correspondent, covering the Democratic Party and Joe Biden’s presidency. He was previously a senior politics reporter for Roll Call, focusing on congressional races, and was National Journal Hotline’s chief political correspondent.
Riley Rogerson
Reporter
Riley is a former Congress reporter for The Daily Beast and the Anchorage Daily News. A Pennsylvania native, she started her reporting career at her hometown newspaper, the Bucks County Courier Times, and Philadelphia magazine. She is a graduate of Georgetown University, where she studied history and government while serving as editor in chief of the student newspaper, The Hoya.
Haley Byrd Wilt
Reporter
Haley has covered Congress since early 2017. She often reports on the Republican Party, foreign policy, human rights and domestic legislation. For three years, she helmed The Dispatch’s congressional coverage with a twice-weekly newsletter, Uphill. Before that, she reported on the House of Representatives for CNN. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy and the Weekly Standard. Haley took an unconventional path into journalism, beginning with an internship out of high school. (She actually skipped her AP U.S. Government exam to cover the House GOP’s 2017 vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act.)
Jasmine Wright
Reporter
Jasmine was most recently a reporter at CNN, where she covered the White House, worked as an embed on the 2020 campaign covering then-Senator Kamala Harris, and covered the 2018 midterms. She was previously a reporter-producer at PBS NewsHour, where she covered politics, the Trump administration and general affairs. She’s a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and a proud Chicagoan. She graduated with honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in broadcast journalism.
Curriculum
Andie Coller
Education Director
Andie has been teaching, training, coaching and editing reporters and advising newsrooms for more than two decades, as an editor at Politico and National Journal magazine, as national audience editor for McClatchy, as program director for the National Press Club Journalism Institute, and as an independent consultant. She is also currently a researcher with the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at the University of Maryland.
Faculty
Tim Alberta
Senior Instructor
Tim is an award-winning journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic. He formerly served as chief political correspondent for Politico. In 2019, he published the critically acclaimed book “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump” — which debuted at No. 1 and No. 2 on the Washington Post and New York Times best-seller lists, respectively — and co-moderated the year’s final Democratic presidential debate aired by PBS NewsHour.
Josh Dawsey
Instructor
Josh is a political investigations reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Previously, he was a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. Before that, he covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Journal.
DeNeen L. Brown
Lecturer
DeNeen, an award-winning writer, has been at The Washington Post for more than 35 years, covering night police, education, politics and culture, and serving as a foreign correspondent in Canada. She is a producer on two documentaries about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and a professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, where she teaches feature writing and “The Power of the Writing Voice.”
Eric M. Garcia
Lecturer
Eric is the senior Washington correspondent for The Independent and the author of the book “We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation.” He is also a columnist for MSNBC. He previously worked as an assistant editor at The Washington Post’s Outlook section, an associate editor at The Hill, and a correspondent for National Journal, MarketWatch and Roll Call. He has also written for The Daily Beast, The New Republic and Salon.
Cheryl W. Thompson
Lecturer
Cheryl is an investigative correspondent for NPR and senior editor overseeing member station investigations. She served as the investigative reporting coach on NPR’s “No Compromise” podcast that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting. Previously, she spent 22 years at The Washington Post. She is an associate professor at George Washington University, and the immediate past president and chairman of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a 6,000-member organization that seeks to improve the quality of investigative journalism.
Development
Kevin Grant
Director of Development
Kevin was co-founder and chief development officer at The GroundTruth Project, home of Report for America and Report for the World. Previously he was an editor at international news site GlobalPost, and his work has been honored with National Edward R. Murrow and duPont-Columbia awards among others. He holds a master’s in journalism from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, where he was a Dean’s Scholar. He teaches ethics and accountability journalism at Georgetown University.
Operations
Lillian Bautista
Audience Editor
Christopher T. Fong
Creative Director
Chris is the former creative director of Protocol, where he oversaw visual storytelling and newsroom production. He has been a designer at the Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle, and has art directed at a data-driven book publishing startup and experiential brand agencies. He also co-created and designed “We Are Bruce Lee: Under the Sky, One Family,” a five-year biographical exhibit that opened in April 2022 at the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco.
Dianna Heitz
Director of Audience and Platforms
Dianna was assistant managing editor at CNN Politics, overseeing the breaking news and digital production teams and mentoring early-career journalists. Previously, she was deputy managing editor at Politico. Originally from Chicagoland, Dianna is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern and Loyola University Chicago.
Justin Peligri
Senior Producer & Director of Editorial Outreach
Justin is a former producer for news anchor Chris Wallace’s programs on CNN and Max, where he booked newsmaking guests across politics, policy and pop culture. He previously worked as a live events producer at The Atlantic and as an associate producer at NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He was an opinions writer, editor and managing director for George Washington University’s student paper, The Hatchet.
Carder Stout
Director of Event Production
David Townsend
Director of Finance & Administration
David joined AJI in 2021 as director of finance and administration bringing broad experience in finance and operations in the nonprofit and higher education sectors. Most recently, he was the vice president for finance and operations with the international nonprofit organization Alliance for Regenerative Medicine and senior vice president for finance and administration for the national trade association Manufactured Housing Institute. Prior experience includes serving as the business officer for Georgetown University Auxiliary Business Services and the University of Mississippi School of Nursing. David received an MBA from Millsaps College and a BA in Communications from the University of Mississippi. He and his wife live in Alexandria, Virginia.
Blend Qatipi
Chief Technology Officer
Blend has worked for more than 30 years on technology-driven solutions for the publishing world. Most recently, he was the chief technology officer of Politico. Previously, he was vice president of engineering at both Alexander Street Press and CQ Roll Call, as well as director of application development at Congressional Quarterly. He has also developed applications at several other companies.
The Allbritton Journalism Institute Board
Robert Allbritton | Duncan Evans | Paul Bonner | Tim Grieve