Politico senior executive editor Alex Burns, deputy executive editor Julia Marsh, and global editor-in-chief John Harris sent out the following:
On a Sunday in early May – just three days after we approached Dan Goldberg about leading White House coverage – he emailed a list of 30 questions about managing the team. They touched on everything from editorial priorities and workflow to team structure to cross-team collaboration.
Like a great reporter, Dan wanted to know everything he could learn about this important assignment. It turns out, he was fascinated by the challenge.
A series of robust discussions about staffing, coverage planning, management styles and newsroom-wide coordination ensued. Today we’re very pleased to announce that Dan has accepted a new role as senior White House editor.
Dan will start working with the White House team immediately. He will fully transition off the health care team where he is a deputy editor in early June.
Dan will join Jen Haberkorn, the deputy White House editor, in overseeing the most talented White House team in Washington. In the coming weeks, we will bring on a third White House editor to enhance the team’s ability to hit hard at daily targets with fresh reporting while also delivering standout enterprise about the administration.
The team is off to a roaring start this year, delivering a near-constant series of scoops on the inner workings of the administration: President Donald Trump’s decision to limit Elon Musk’s power, internal administration battles over Trump’s trade war, consequential policy decisions on prescriptions drugs and immigration restrictions and more. Working with partners across the newsroom, our White House reporters have pierced Trump’s circle to reveal the administration’s sensitive internal deliberations and ongoing contests for power.
Dan is the right leader to build on this success and sustain it for the long term. His probing questions about the new role are reflective of his intelligent and urgent approach to editing: he engages colleagues to work through problems. He’s constantly thinking of sharp story frames. He embraces challenges with a constructive spirit and a keen sense of humor.
He has thought deeply about how to organize the White House team around distinctive storylines that will ensure we are the most essential destination for readers hungry to understand what the Trump administration is thinking and how they’re wielding power from Washington to the Hague.
And he’s got the receipts to get us there. Dan thrives at the intersection of politics and policy coverage, and his outstanding editing during the 2024 campaign — particularly working with Alice Ollstein and Megan Messerly on the battle over abortion policy and reproductive health — helped distinguish POLITICO’s election-year coverage from our competitors.
While Dan has been a key member of our national health team for 7 years now, POLITICO insiders know that he also played a crucial role in building our state policy and political coverage into the juggernaut it is today. Dan launched the New York health care newsletter a decade ago, setting the standard for how POLITICO drives health policy coverage for our state audiences.
Like we’ve seen with how Playbook this year has showcased reporting from across the newsroom, Dan is eager to lock arms with editors on Congress, politics, legal and policy teams to elevate our coverage by bringing more comprehensive and thus revelatory reporting to our different audiences.
Before joining POLITICO, Dan was a health reporter at The Star-Ledger where he got his start in news after a short stint at a small California daily newspaper. Dan will relocate from New Jersey to the Washington area with his family in August. Please congratulate him on his new chapter as a leader at POLITICO.
