Announcement from National Editor Matea Gold, Deputy National Editor Philip Rucker and Senior Politics Editor Dan Eggen:
We are delighted to announce that Vanessa Williams will become a deputy National politics editor, steering coverage of voters and a changing American electorate.
In this position, Vanessa will bring her keen instincts for untold stories to shape compelling and distinctive pieces about the shifting political terrain heading into this year’s midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election. She will help reporters execute illuminating coverage about what animates disparate groups of voters and how they decide which candidates reflect their values. She will also assist in our broader campaign and political report and work in close collaboration with the newly formed Democracy team, helping shape coverage of what Americans experience at the polls.
Vanessa brings to this role her extensive experience covering race and politics, as well as a longstanding commitment to elevating the voices of disenfranchised Americans. As a reporter on the America team for the last five years, she wrote about the disproportionate rate of covid-19 infections and deaths among Black people, how Black voter participation affected the 2020 election and efforts to pass federal voting legislation. She has extensively chronicled the political activities of Black women, including the 2018 campaign of Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and captured the excitement about the first Black female Supreme Court justice.
Since January 2018, she has helped write and edit the twice-weekly newsletter, About US, which features reporting, analysis and perspective about how individuals and institutions navigate the debate about race, gender, sexual orientation and other identity issues. In that role, she helped to conceive and edit projects that explored diversity within the country’s growing Latino community and showed how Native Americans are making their presence felt and voices heard throughout society.
Vanessa joined The Post in 1996 to cover Washington, D.C.’s city government. She became an assistant city editor in 2000, worked on the now-defunct continuous news desk, and has edited on both the Local and National desks.
Before The Post, she spent 12 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, covering local government and politics, and helped to uncover an absentee ballot fraud scheme that resulted in a state Senate election being overturned. She started her journalism career at her hometown newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, now the Tampa Bay Times.
Vanessa is a former president and board member of the National Association of Black Journalists and has served as a mentor to countless young journalists in the Post newsroom and throughout the industry. In her spare time, she likes to travel and bake sweets.
Please join us in congratulating Vanessa on her new role, which starts immediately.
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