Political reporter Jason Horowitz is leaving The New York Observer for The Washington Post.
Mr. Horowitz has been reporting for the Observer since 2005. He covered local politics and the 2008 presidential campaign. (Among other things, he got this memorable description of Barack Obama from then-presidential hopeful Joe Biden.)
At the Post, he’ll be working on the Style desk, writing features and profiles of DC’s politicians and power players.
Observer editor Tom McGeveran sent out a memo to staff making the announcement. Here it is:
Hello, everyone.
I’m sad to have to write you the news that Jason Horowitz, our good friend and the lead political reporter for The Observer, has decided to take a job in Washington, D.C. to write features about Washington power-brokers for the Style section of The Washington Post.
Jason’s first contribution to the Observer was just before I arrived here myself, when he served as an intern and fact-checker in the old Townhouse on East 64th Street in 2000.
He left us then to write for the Globe and the Times in Italy, and returned in July of 2005 as a full-time reporter, where he was assigned to the culture news beat. Since then his work on our political desk with his editor, Josh Benson, has put the paper on the national map with reporting from the 2008 presidential campaign and, more recently, the tangle of statewide politics and two of our favorite topics, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.
It hardly needs saying how much we will miss his hard work and dedication to the paper, his considerable talent as a writer and thinker about politics, and, of course, his perennial MVP status as third baseman for the Observer’s temporarily dormant summer softball team.
As sad as it is to lose Jason, it’s hard not to be excited for him as he starts this new chapter of his career from one of the most prominent platforms for political writing in American journalism. Institutionally, we should take it as a signal of our own success that Jason’s writing for the Observer was perceived, correctly, as among the best writing about politics in the country. That is a credit to Jason, and also this paper, in a period when credit for hard work and dedication to writing in general and sound journalism in particular often passes its practitioners by.
Please join me in wishing Jason and his family all the luck it requires to give up a beautiful new New York apartment to move down to D.C.; and best wishes (here luck is superfluous) for his future with the Post.
– Tom
