Griff Witte named senior politics and democracy editor for The Washington Post

Griff Witte

Announcement from National Editor Phil Rucker and Deputy National Editor Amy Fiscus:

We are delighted to announce that Griff Witte, one of The Post’s most ambitious journalists and deepest thinkers who has been at the forefront of some of the biggest stories of our time, is taking on an expanded role as senior politics and democracy editor.

Griff’s new assignment and title are signs of our commitment to aggressively and comprehensively covering the second Trump presidency, the new Congress and the rest of this historic story. The administration and its intersection with government institutions is both a politics and a democracy story, so we will bring these two talented teams under Griff's leadership to chronicle this moment with rigor, creativity and independence.

Also, as part of our reorganization of coverage for the new year, Nick Baumann will continue in his role helping run our politics team and coverage but take on the new title of politics editor, reporting to Griff. Since he joined The Post in the spring, Nick has been a force for strong political editing, impressing us with his journalistic instincts and thoughtful management. Additionally, a democracy editor will also report to Griff. We will have more for you on that and other editing assignments on the expanded politics and democracy team soon.

Griff is a natural fit to oversee this powerhouse group of journalists, having spent nearly three years executing first-in-class work as the founding editor of the Democracy team. He led its path-breaking reporting on the struggle over who gets represented in America and the push to delegitimize elections. Among other work, he directed a year-long exploration of the structural flaws in America’s constitutional framework (and how to fix them). He also guided a series on what happens when far-right ideologues take over the workings of local government; it won this year’s Toner Prize for excellence in political reporting.

In more than two decades at The Post, Griff has reported from more than 30 countries and from across the United States. He has served as bureau chief in Kabul, Islamabad, Jerusalem, London and Berlin.

Griff has covered insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, wars in Gaza, the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, the return of autocracy in central Europe and the dawn of the Brexit era in Britain. His reports on refugees crossing to Europe via a Greek island and on hate-preachers radicalizing followers in Britain were recognized, respectively, by the National Press Foundation and the Overseas Press Club.

In between international postings, Griff was deputy foreign editor, guiding prize-winning coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also ran an immersive multimedia project on refugees and championed the creation of The Post’s foreign-affairs blog, WorldViews.

Following his latest return to the United States, in 2019, Griff roamed the country as a member of Team America. His work took him to Texas to tell the story of Afghans coming off a round-the-world odyssey, to Michigan to chronicle a congresswoman’s navigation of her district’s toxic divisions and to Mississippi to report on the state capital with undrinkable tap water. The latter was part of a package of stories recognized as a Pulitzer finalist. In 2020, he was a member of the team that produced the multi-award-winning project “George Floyd’s America.”

Griff has taught classes on foreign correspondence at Princeton – his alma mater – as well as Georgetown University. He started his career at the Miami Herald and joined The Post newsroom in 2002 to research Steve Coll’s history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, “Ghost Wars,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. He was later an intern on the Metro staff and anchored a series on vanishing middle-class jobs for Business.