Ryan Grim to Head The Intercept’s Washington Bureau

Ryan Grim will be joining The Intercept as D.C. bureau chief later this month.

Grim was most recently the D.C. bureau chief for the Huffington Post, where he led a team renowned for breaking political news while his own reporting probed influence peddling, corruption, and the human consequences of public policy. Under his leadership, the Huffington Post’s Washington bureau was twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, winning once.

He edited and contributed reporting to a groundbreaking 2015 investigative project on heroin treatment that not only changed federal and state laws but shifted the culture of the recovery industry. The story, by Jason Cherkis, was a Pulitzer finalist and won a Polk Award.

Grim, who grew up in rural Maryland, wrote a highly entertaining and deeply informative book, “This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.” A former contributor to MSNBC, he is currently a Young Turks contributor.

“Since The Intercept launched, Washington in general and Congress in particular have been mired in stalemate. But with Donald Trump in the White House, Washington is coming alive again, in both the best and the worst ways. In that revival is an opportunity to expand what The Intercept has been doing,” Grim said. “Pound for pound, The Intercept is already one of the best fighters in the ring. Bringing that strength to bear on Washington will allow us to not just cover the debates that Trump has unleashed, but to shape them — and to force new debates that this town would rather not have.”

I would like to thank our outgoing Washington editor, Dan Froomkin, for his extraordinary contributions to The Intercept as a writer, editor, and leader. Dan was integral to The Intercept from the start, building up a scrappy and smart bureau from scratch and infusing our independent voice on politics with his skepticism, wisdom, and wit. Dan never wavered in his fierce commitment to The Intercept’s core mission of producing original accountability journalism in a field saturated with obsequious and access-driven coverage, and we are grateful for everything he has done to make The Intercept what it has become.