POLITICO names Sasha Issenberg managing editor, Enterprise

Announcement from Senior Executive Editor Alex Burns:

Team —

We are delighted to announce today that Sasha Issenberg is taking on a new role overseeing our most ambitious enterprise journalism and leading cross-team projects throughout the newsroom.

As Managing Editor, Enterprise, Sasha will have a broad mandate to envision and execute reporting projects that draw on the vast intelligence and sourcing of POLITICO’s international newsroom.

Sasha is one of the most creative and accomplished journalists of his generation, with a body of work built on his omnivorous intellectual curiosity and supreme grasp of politics as a human endeavor. He is uniquely equipped to take POLITICO’s enterprise journalism to new heights.

This is the right moment for us as a newsroom to drive at that goal.

In recent years we have moved aggressively to strengthen our core news report, particularly in Washington, and to push hard into newer competitive spaces for us like legal journalism, Silicon Valley reporting and the politics of California and Canada. We have delivered some formidable enterprise reporting during that time, including the Biden’s Billions project in 2024, a prescient account of the last president’s lumbering industrial policy, and the Young Republicans exposé last month, a riveting investigation of rampant bigotry in a national activist group.

We have so much more room to build on our news report with memorable enterprise and investigative reporting. Sasha is the right editor to lead that effort.

A former reporter for the Boston Globe, Bloomberg and other national outlets, Sasha is the author of several landmark books that take on the political disruptions of our time, including The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage and The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Defeating Disinformation and Winning Elections.

Among Sasha’s many qualities is the gift of anticipation: He has a special way of seeing where big stories may be headed, and figuring out where to invest time and effort on long-term reporting projects. He has already put that skill to great use at POLITICO, working as an editor on the California team to build our coverage of ballot initiatives well before one such question — Proposition 50 — became a consuming event in American politics.

He is a generous colleague and a graceful collaborator — precisely the combination of traits we need in an editor charged with pursuing difficult enterprise and investigative targets with a range of newsroom partners. Emblematic of Sasha’s style is the series he has led on the inside politics of FIFA, working with Sophia Cai to land high-impact reporting in this space even as Sophia competes aggressively on the White House beat.

Sasha will report to me and partner with other senior editors to devise POLITICO’s enterprise agenda. He will continue to support the California team and edit Will McCarthy, California political reporter, and also oversee the politics-and-soccer project.

Sasha is based in Los Angeles, where he teaches in UCLA’s Political Science Department. He is surely the only political reporter alive whose study boasts campaign souvenirs from both Milton Shapp and Keiko Fujimori.

Please join me in congratulating him on this exciting new role.