Writeswell Inc.

Hope springs …

Robert Allbritton was on a ski lift in Aspen, Colo., when he learned that many of the Washington Post’s top journalists were considering leaving the storied but troubled outlet.

“Take em all,” the billionaire co-founder of Politico texted to the editor of his news startup, Notus.

Allbritton canceled a Caribbean cruise, flew his jet home to Washington, D.C., and started planning. He and his editor, Tim Grieve, joined a video call with about 15 disgruntled Post reporters in mid-February, trading thoughts about filling a void after the Post gutted its local-news and sports desks.

His plan: Expand his two-year-old publication, Notus, by hiring big-name reporters to cover topics relevant to Washington’s powerful residents. (Notus stands for News of the United States.)

He is renaming the publication the Star, a nod to the Washington Star, a former D.C. paper that his father once owned.

“We are a factory town. Detroit makes cars, we make government,” Allbritton said in a recent interview at a cafe near his Georgetown home. “There needs to be a paper around here that is focused on what we do.”

He plans to invest about $10 million into the Star this year. With revenue from subscriptions and advertisements, he expects the operation to break even by 2029.

With the Star, Allbritton said, a sale isn’t the endgame.

“I don’t need the damn money,” he said. “This time, let’s do it for the purity of the mission.”

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