Friends, I have some news to share. This is my final week at The Washington Post.

I have a wonderful opportunity to do substantially the same work — covering the White House and economic policy — at another renowned institution full of kind and talented people. I’ll share more about that in the days ahead.

The decision to leave The Post, my home of 10 years, was wrenching. I joined the paper as an intern headed into my senior year of college. I had to beg the other interns to hold happy hours at restaurants rather than bars; if the establishment carded at the door, I couldn’t get in. I freelanced for The Post during my senior year at the University of Missouri, then returned for another summer internship.

The job covering technology that I was slotted to be hired into was frozen that fall due to budget cuts. The only remaining opening was a role covering high school sports. I asked every member of the Sports staff on the Post softball team to put in a good word for me with the hiring editor. I got the job, and bounced around the paper for nine more years.

That’s part of the beauty of The Post. People have such broad imaginations about what others could be good at, and what skills were transferable. Who’d have thought a high school sports reporter could cover the White House? I’m far from the only person with such a Washington Post career trajectory.

When I came aboard, The Post was beginning its flight. The talent in the building — then, 1150 15th Street NW — was immense, and the pipeline of prospects seemed never-ending.

Fresh off Jeff Bezos’s purchase, the paper was busy whooping the New York Times across the lower 48. Carol Leonnig had just won a Pulitzer Prize for her investigation of security lapses by the Secret Service. We dominated coverage of the 2016 election, and then Donald Trump’s first presidency. We had groundbreaking coverage of the epidemic of mass shootings across the country — another Pulitzer. David Farenthold won yet another Pulitzer for revealing inconsistencies in Trump’s promises of charitable donations.

Marty Baron — depicted heroically in the 2015 Best Picture “Spotlight” — was our fearless editor, and my parents constantly asked if I’d met him yet. When I finally did, I walked into his office asking for “Mr. Baron.” He jovially told me to call him Marty.

“If it’s all the same to you,” I said, knees shaking, “I’d prefer Mr. Baron.”

I don’t recall the rest of the meeting. I was so awe-struck, my memory blacked out. Over the years with Marty, I found him to be humble and straightforward. I asked him once what it was like to be portrayed in a movie. “I wish people would stop asking,” he said. “I’m just me.”

We moved to a glimmery new office at 13th and K Streets. The glass walls of the conference rooms were coated with historic headlines and front pages in Post history. There were kitchens on each floor with stainless steel appliances. The “Hub,” where editors gathered to plan the day’s report, was bedecked with a massive monitor of ever-flowing audience statistics. It looked like a true nerve center for a 21st century news operation.

And yet, a newsroom of the future was happy to defer to the creative whims of early 20-somethings. I floated ditching the weekly rankings of boys’ and girls’ basketball teams to create a March Madness style bracket. My editor said to go for it. I pitched revealing the bracket on a live Twitter show. My editor loved it.

Jesse Dougherty, my beat partner, and I posted up in a conference room to record and came out an hour later feeling great about ourselves but confused by the lack of comments on the live stream. Turns out we forgot to hit “record.” Oops.

“We had it so good, didn’t we?” I texted Jesse last week.

“Yeah, we really, really did,” he wrote back.

I am not going to turn this into a full, decade-long remembrance. (Though I can, if folks tell me they’d like more stories.) And there were certainly some rough times even before things got really rough.

There are a lot of eulogies being written of The Post these days, including by some former Posties whom I admire. And there’s a tough balance to strike between mourning what we had — as a country, as the D.C. region, as journalists — and commenting on what remains.

I am leaving behind so many valued and brilliant colleagues and friends. And though The Post is inarguably diminished — down from 800-ish journalists to 400-some — reports of its death (one column called it a “murder”) are premature.

The Post will rise again. Like it always has. Many of the people there are not just the future of the paper, but the future of American journalism. And though I may no longer work there past Wednesday, I will always be on their team.

To say I love The Washington Post is a horrendous understatement. I have sacrificed more for it than anything else in my life — sleep, time, personal safety, pieces of my family life and friendships. And I’ve let it. That’s the power of Washington Post journalism: it makes you believe your work matters to the world, and that it’s a privilege to give of yourself.

I hope you will subscribe to The Post after I leave, or at least keep its journalists in your life and routines. I also hope you’ll follow me to my next destination, and subscribe to that outlet, too.

In the meantime, let’s stay in touch here. Email me at [email protected] and contact me securely on Signal at jacobbogage.87. And follow me on Bluesky (@jacobbogage.bsky.social) and LinkedIn.