I’ve spent years learning how to prep for interviews, testimony, TV hits — the words, the pacing, the message. What I hadn’t spent much time thinking about is the split second before any of that: the photo someone sees before they ever hear you speak.

That’s exactly the space my guest this week lives in. Mira Adwell is a photographer who spent years shooting fashion editorial in Charleston before relocating back to DC, where she now works almost exclusively in portraits and personal branding — CEOs, senators, first-time founders, all trying to figure out how to show up.

What struck me most is how much of her job is actually psychology. She watches for the signs most people think they’re hiding — shallow breathing, a dry mouth, fidgeting hands — and instead of pushing through a shoot, she puts the camera down and just talks. By the time she picks the camera back up, the nerves are gone.

She also relayed something Kevin O’Leary told her directly — blunt, but it’s the whole argument for why this matters.

My favorite line of the conversation was about this city specifically. Mira sees it constantly in her DC clients — the low-grade performance anxiety of a town where perception never fully switches off.

When you live in Washington, D.C., it’s easy to think the whole city runs on politics. But spend any time here — especially in the fall, when the Capitals and the Commanders and half a dozen other teams are all playing at once — and you realize pretty quickly that sports is what actually brings people together.

That’s where my conversation with Jeff Dooley starts this week. Jeff is an editor at NOTUS, where he’s building a local news operation from scratch — covering DC sports, food, news, and arts and culture. He grew up in Falls Church, Virginia, where reading the Washington Post sports section gave him his first love of journalism. And now he’s helping build the kind of coverage he grew up with, for a city that is hungry for exactly that.

We talked about the Nationals this season — a team where fans, after years of a pretty aimless rebuild, finally have a reason to care again. We talked about the Commanders, the RFK site, and a new ownership group that’s making real investments that players and fans are actually noticing. And we talked about the bigger thing underneath all of it: the way local sports coverage is part of what holds a community together.

“To understand sports is to understand life and to understand human nature and decision making,” Jeff told me. I’ve been turning that line over ever since we recorded.

Jeff also gave listeners a preview of something I’m genuinely excited about: NOTUS is launching a free local newsletter at the end of July — delivered to your inbox every morning, covering DC news, sports, food, and more. You can sign up now on any article page at notus.org, and I’ve included the link in the show notes.

This is the final episode of our month-long NOTUS takeover of The Friday Reporter — and it’s been one of my favorite months of conversations in a long time. From Kadia and Paul to Deirdre to Jeff, every guest reminded me of what great journalism looks like when people actually care about the community they’re covering.

I’m so grateful to everyone at NOTUS for making this happen. And I’m grateful, as always, to you for listening.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.

— Lisa

This week I sat down with Alyssa Rosenberg — dean of the Allbritton Journalism Institute, the organization behind NOTUS — for the third episode of our month-long NOTUS takeover series. Alyssa spent more than 20 years at the Washington Post as a reporter, editor and cultural critic before taking a buyout in 2025 and doing something most journalists would never admit to out loud: going looking for a good pirate ship to join.She found one. And our conversation ranged across the entire landscape of what journalism is becoming — the skills young reporters need now that didn’t exist when we started out, what breaks when a news organization violates the implicit compact with its readers, why politics has become just another entertainment fandom, and what the next five years might actually look like.I’ll be honest: I came in with a theory I’d been testing — that the loss of local journalism is driving the nationalization of politics. Alyssa pushed back on it, and she was right. The parties themselves are driving a lot of that conformity. Having someone challenge a premise that carefully, with that much context from inside the industry, is exactly what I love about these conversations.Three moments I keep coming back to:

“There are so few pathways for young people to come to D.C. and to do so especially if they don’t have family money, if they can’t afford to sort of take a risk.”

“Our politics have become sort of yet another fandom, yet another entertainment arena. And I don’t think that’s particularly healthy from a civic perspective.”

“The ability to go out and find facts in the real world is going to end up being more valuable than ever.”

TAKEAWAY

In a media moment full of doom and gloom, Alyssa’s clearest argument is an optimistic one: the same tools that have destabilized the old journalism business model are about to unlock a generation of journalists whose instincts were never fully matched by the platforms available to them. The nerds are coming — and they’re going to be incredible.