John Ramsey joins The Washington Post’s Local desk as a criminal justice and legal affairs editor

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Announcement from Executive Local Editor Jamie Stockwell and Deputy Local Editors Matt Zapotosky and Maria Glod: 

We’re delighted to announce that John Ramsey, who has driven high-elevation, high-impact work in newsrooms in South Carolina and Virginia, is joining the Local desk as a criminal justice and legal affairs editor.

In this role, John will play a key role in shaping our criminal justice and legal affairs coverage in D.C. and its suburbs, commissioning stories about high-profile public safety matters and policing and prosecutorial strategies on both a local and federal level. John will bring to bear his significant enterprise reporting and editing experience as he guides journalists covering some of the most important issues and cases in the region, including the prosecutions in D.C. federal court of accused Jan. 6 rioters and former president Donald Trump.

John is known for his ambitious approach to stories and for his collaborative work with his colleagues. He comes to us from The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., where he was most recently a reporter on the projects team. In that role, he examined the hidden dangers of climate change and exposed a man stripped of his medical license who was nonetheless able to grow a telehealth business and reap millions offering same-day Suboxone treatment to thousands of opioid-dependent patients in dozens of states. Before joining the Post and Courier, John worked for nearly a decade as a reporter and editor at the Richmond Times Dispatch, where stories he helped shepherd led to a new state law on adult guardianship, a federal investigation into jail deaths and a state investigation into living conditions in the city's largest Latino neighborhood.

John graduated in 2005 with a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He started his career at the Rocky Mount Telegram in Rocky Mount, N.C., then moved to the Fayetteville Observer to cover military issues.

He was born and raised in Green Creek, in western N.C., on a street that dead-ended into a rodeo, and most of his family still lives there. He recently traveled home to capture devastation of Hurricane Helene through the eyes of someone who grew up there. When he’s not working, he can be found walking his Basset hound, Addie, cooking or looking for a pickup basketball game.

Please join us in welcoming John to The Post. He starts on Nov. 11.

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