04/24/2026
Good News for a change.
Robert Allbritton was on a ski lift in Aspen, Colo., when he learned that many of the Washington Post’s top journalists were considering leaving the storied but troubled outlet.
“Take em all,” the billionaire co-founder of Politico texted to the editor of his news startup, Notus.
Allbritton canceled a Caribbean cruise, flew his jet home to Washington, D.C., and started planning. He and his editor, Tim Grieve, joined a video call with about 15 disgruntled Post reporters in mid-February, trading thoughts about filling a void after the Post gutted its local-news and sports desks.
His plan: Expand his two-year-old publication, Notus, by hiring big-name reporters to cover topics relevant to Washington’s powerful residents. (Notus stands for News of the United States.)
He is renaming the publication the Star, a nod to the Washington Star, a former D.C. paper that his father once owned.
“We are a factory town. Detroit makes cars, we make government,” Allbritton said in a recent interview at a cafe near his Georgetown home. “There needs to be a paper around here that is focused on what we do.”
Plenty of billionaires have set out, and struggled, to revive America’s news institutions, including Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Los Angeles Times. While Washington is a crowded media market, with titles including the Post, Politico, Punchbowl and Roll Call, Allbritton is unfazed by the challenge.
“I don’t see failure as even a decent probability,” said Allbritton, who helped found Politico in 2007 and sold it to Axel Springer in 2021.
He plans to invest about $10 million into the Star this year. With revenue from subscriptions and advertisements, he expects the operation to break even by 2029.
With the Star, Allbritton said, a sale isn’t the endgame.
“I don’t need the damn money,” he said. “This time, let’s do it for the purity of the mission.”
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