For the next month, The Friday Reporter is in the hands of NOTUS.

If you haven’t been paying close attention to what’s happening over there, now is the time to start. In a moment when most Washington newsrooms are contracting — the Washington Post went from roughly 1,000 to 400 people in three years — NOTUS is doing the opposite. It’s attracting some of the best reporters in the business, investing in a serious fellows program, and breaking news every week.

This week, I sat down with two of its newest and most high-profile additions: Kadia Goba, who came to NOTUS from the Post (via BuzzFeed News), and Paul Kane, who spent 19 years and three months at the Post before the February 4th layoffs became what he called his “before and after” moment.

Both of them cover Capitol Hill every day. And both of them see things most people miss.

PK’s framing stuck with me: the public already has a brutally low opinion of Congress — a 10% approval rating in Gallup. But even with that as the baseline, most people still don’t understand how little is actually getting accomplished. Last year was the lowest legislative output in recorded history. The Senate spent three-quarters of its time processing executive nominations. The noise of apparent conflict gives the impression that things are happening. They aren’t.

The counterintuitive insight that surprised me most: the Freedom Caucus — the most conservative bloc in the House — are actually among the biggest supporters of the mainstream press. They beeline for Manu Raju’s camera after every vote. They give reporters their cell numbers. If Speaker Johnson ever tried to curtail press access, PK says the Freedom Caucus would revolt. I believe him.

There’s also a genuinely hopeful note in this conversation. The incoming freshman classes of 2026 weren’t in Washington on January 6th. They don’t carry the same scar tissue. PK thinks that matters. So do I.

It’s a conversation that left me more optimistic about journalism — and more clear-eyed about Congress — than I’ve been in a while.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

There’s a conversation I come back to every so often in this work — the kind where you walk away thinking differently about something you assumed you understood. This week’s episode was one of those.

I sat down with Chad Peace, the voter advocate and attorney behind the More Choice initiative and the Independent Voter Project. If you’ve heard of California’s top-two primary — the system where the two highest vote-getters in a primary advance to the general, regardless of party — Chad was one of the architects. He’s spent years in courtrooms and state legislatures arguing for something that sounds deceptively simple: that the right to vote should belong to you, the individual, not to the party you join.

The conversation that stuck with me was about incentives. Right now, our election system rewards division. You don’t have to win by being good — you can win by making your opponent look terrible. That’s not a bug in the system. It’s the design. And it’s why we keep electing people who are better at tearing things down than building consensus.

More Choice — Chad’s proposed next step beyond the top-two — would advance four or more candidates to November and give voters the ability to rank their preferences. The idea is simple: if second- and third-place votes matter, you can’t win just by going negative. You have to actually persuade people who don’t already agree with you. That changes the calculus completely.

I also appreciated how clear-eyed Chad is about the opposition. Both parties — left and right — want to get rid of the top-two. They call it a “jungle primary” (a term he correctly identifies as deliberately pejorative). Their solution? Go back to closed primaries, where party members pick the candidates and everyone else chooses from whatever’s left in November.

His response: that’s not reform. That’s consolidating power.

Chad grew up between a Republican family on his mom’s side and a Kentucky Democrat on his father’s. They never fought at the dinner table. They respected each other. He believes most voters are actually like that — closer to the middle than our political system reflects. The system just isn’t built to show it.

This one is worth your time, whether you follow election reform closely or you just found yourself standing in a voting booth last November thinking: really? These are my only options?

Full episode is on YouTube now.

— Lisa

When I sat down with Kasia Hatcher for the latest episode of The Friday Reporter, she described every adult as having an invisible operating system — not just what we think, but how we make sense of the world. Most leadership development, she said, works on the apps. The skills, the tools, the behaviors. What she does is go deeper: to the patterns that have been running your leadership without your awareness.

I’ve worked with Kasia personally. She is the real thing. And bringing her onto The Friday Reporter felt long overdue, because what she does for founders and executives is genuinely hard to describe until you experience it — and I wanted to try.

We talked about a lot in this episode. Why most systems fail solo entrepreneurs (hint: they built it for someone else’s business). How to actually integrate AI without generating what Kasia very accurately calls “slop.” And the thing I’ve gotten the most value from in our work together: how to have the hard conversations you’ve been avoiding.

Her framework for that is deceptively simple. Make the decision before you go in. Strip to one fact. Then stop talking. She said something I think about every time I’m about to have a difficult conversation: your job is not to manage the other person’s emotions. Your job is to stay grounded enough to have the conversation at all.

There’s a story near the end about a client who had been avoiding a phone call for two weeks — a conflict of interest situation with real money on the line. Kasia helped her prepare, and she made the call that night. Three minutes. No blowup. No fallout. And the outcome was better than if she’d taken the new client in the first place. That’s not magic. That’s just what happens when you stop rehearsing and start doing the actual work.

This one is for every founder who is running — really running — and can’t quite figure out why the battery never feels full.