Peter Wallsten named senior national investigations editor for The Washington Post

Announcement from Managing Editor Steven Ginsberg and National Editor Matea Gold:

We are delighted to announce that Peter Wallsten is taking on an expansive new portfolio as Senior National Investigations Editor.

In this role, Peter will spearhead ambitious investigative pieces across the National staff, working with other editors and reporters to produce revelatory journalism on the most urgent topics of the day. He will launch and direct cross-team stories, bringing firepower to pressing accountability questions, and serve as a coach for other editors and reporters, helping them determine how to pursue the best investigative targets. Peter will also serve as lead on National’s investigative collaborations with other departments, helping convene teams of reporters and editors around complex storylines that require contributions from journalists across the newsroom.

In addition, Peter will oversee our new Democracy team, guiding coverage of the unprecedented pressures being put on voting systems around the country and the fraying public trust in the outcome of elections.

This position, which will report to the National editor, builds on Peter’s leadership as an editor in Politics for the last nine years, during which he elevated our report and brought powerful accountability-based approaches to coverage. In 2013, he created the Political Investigations and Enterprise team, a powerhouse group responsible for some of our most consequential journalism and specializing in quick-turn, high-impact stories close to the news. In that role, he edited Carol Leonnig’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Secret Service coverage and helped lead The Post’s Trump-Russia coverage that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize.

As senior national politics editor for the last four years, Peter has been the force behind a series of innovations. He created the political breaking news team, which quickly became a linchpin of our daily report and a model for live coverage adopted by other departments. He led an expansion of the staff and fostered engaging approaches to coverage, including Dave Weigel’s Trailer newsletter, a post-2016 digital democracy beat, a White House beat reported through the lens of Capitol Hill and a soon-to-be-launched live analysis feed called Post Politics Now.

Peter arrived at The Post in 2010, first working as a White House correspondent and then as a political enterprise writer. Before joining The Post, he covered national politics for the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. He previously covered Florida politics and government for the then-St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald. As someone who has shared his experience with Stargardt’s Disease, a degenerative retinal condition that has taken much of his eyesight, Peter has been a source of advice and support to low-vision and blind colleagues within and beyond journalism.

A native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Peter graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he was editor of the Daily Tar Heel. He lives in Washington with his wife, Stacey, and their sons, Isaac and Teddy.