Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray announced Thursday that business editor Lori Montgomery will now oversee its politics and government coverage.
Here’s part of Murray’s announcement:
Lori Montgomery will focus on continuing and extending The Post’s longstanding, vital role of reporting and analysis about the politicians, policy and powers in our own backyard and across the country as she TAKES OVER the new Politics and Government department.
A 25-year Post veteran, Lori has run the Business desk since 2021. Under her, The Post has built an already strong economics team into a major force, delivering both insightful coverage of the economy’s role in the 2024 election and scoops on Donald Trump’s transformation of government. Lori will continue to manage that team in the new department. She has pushed for relevant tech coverage on major stories like Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover in 2022 and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. She launched Andrew Van Dam’s popular Department of Data (now also on YouTube), as well as ambitious projects on the effects of economic sanctions, the creator economy and the shocking toll of walkaway deaths at the nation’s assisted-living facilities.
Before that, Lori served six years as deputy national editor, assembling an award-winning Climate team and closely overseeing a 2019 series that exposed hotspots of global warming, a project that won the Pulitzer Prize. She expanded the America team and built it into a formidable force on breaking news, and helped drive aggressive and creative coverage of the first Trump administration. As The Post’s first America desk editor, she led the team — with Investigative editor David Fallis — that built the first-ever national database of fatal police shootings in 2015. That project, too, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.Before becoming an editor, Lori spent nine years as an economic policy reporter, leading coverage of Washington’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, and six years covering politics and government in D.C. and Maryland. She came to The Post from Knight Ridder, where she spent three years as Europe bureau chief, covering the war over Kosovo and the emerging economies of post-Communist central Europe. Lori also covered politics and government for the Detroit Free Press and the Dallas Times Herald, and spent two years as a policy analyst for the great state of Texas. She is a graduate of Northwestern University with a bachelor’s from the Medill School of Journalism.
