The desk where the world’s most important stories are broken.
The Correspondent is an online news desk, video program and podcast covering foreign policy, global affairs and national security — built around an up-close and personal view of the world.
Read on SubstackThe 24-hour news cycle rewards speed and volume. We pursue the opposite — the slow, sourced, unmistakable signal of how power actually moves across the globe.
What we cover
The doctrine, the diplomacy and the deals — read from primary sources, not the press release.
Defense posture, intelligence and the institutions guarding the state, examined without the theater.
The slow-moving tectonics between nations that the 24-hour cycle almost always misses.
Source documents, open-source analysis and the tradecraft behind the headlines.
The broadcast.
Field reporting, declassified records and the correspondent’s read of the week, delivered on screen and in print.
A long-form investigation into a single story shaping the order.
Principles of the desk
The Deep Signal
We filter the noise to surface the underlying forces — the signal that compounds over weeks, not seconds.
Grounded in Place
Every dispatch carries a location origin. Reporting rooted in physical reality, not abstraction.
Source-First
Documents before opinion. We show the record and let the reader see the work.
No Theater
No panels, no shouting, no spin. A single correspondent’s considered view.
Why I created The Correspondent
I've spent 12 years in corporate journalism, a career that has taken me from the wheat fields of Kansas and the beaches of Florida to the tops of aircraft carriers, the halls of power in Washington and some of the most complicated and consequential places in the world. It is a life I could not have imagined when I was starting out, and one I feel incredibly lucky to have lived.
But it was the traveling that changed me most.
There is something about leaving the country, getting off the plane and realizing that the story you have been reading about for weeks looks very different when you are standing in the middle of it. You see the people who have been reduced to statistics in a news story, you hear the fear and frustration in their voices, and you begin to understand how much gets lost when we try to explain the world entirely from behind a desk.
Some of the moments I remember most from my career have nothing to do with the biggest stories I've written. They are conversations with a family after their home was destroyed, a soldier calling home from the front, a diplomat quietly sharing something he probably shouldn't, or a city waking up after spending the night in a bomb shelter. They are the moments when the enormous geopolitical stories we spend so much time talking about suddenly become very human.
Those experiences are what inspired me to create The Correspondent.
I want to get back to the kind of journalism that first made me fall in love with this profession — journalism that requires you to go somewhere, to knock on a door, to sit across from someone and listen, to ask the question that hasn't already been asked 20 times and to stay long enough to understand the answer.
We live in a media environment where a major story can happen in the morning and, by lunchtime, be written 25 different ways by hundreds of different outlets. I have spent much of my career inside that world, and I understand why it happens. The news moves quickly, readers expect answers immediately and there is enormous pressure to keep up.
But I don't want the rest of my career to be about simply keeping up.
I want to tell stories that are worth slowing down for.
I want to travel to places where the consequences of decisions made in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and other capitals are being felt in very real ways, and I want to spend enough time there to understand what is actually happening beneath the headlines. I want to talk to the people who rarely make it into the story, whether that is the soldier on the front line, the family living through a war, the intelligence officer who saw something coming, the diplomat trying to prevent the next crisis or the ordinary person who suddenly finds themselves living through history.
The Correspondent will be about foreign policy and national security, but it will ultimately be about people. It will be about what happens when the decisions made in distant capitals reach someone's front door, and about trying to understand a changing world by actually going out into it.
That means getting on planes, crossing borders, sitting in rooms where difficult conversations are happening and sometimes going somewhere simply because I think there is a story there. It means accepting that the best story may not be the easiest one to report, or the one that will generate the most clicks, or even the one everyone else is talking about that day.
After 12 years in corporate journalism, I'm taking a leap and building something of my own because I still believe deeply in journalism, perhaps more than I ever have. I believe there are stories that deserve to be told properly, people whose experiences deserve to be heard and places that deserve more than a few paragraphs in the news cycle before we move on to the next crisis.
Most of all, I believe there is still value in being there.
I don't know exactly where The Correspondent will take me, but I know it will take me places, and I know I want you to come with me.
This is the next chapter, and in many ways, it feels like a return to the beginning — to the reason I became a journalist in the first place, which was simply to see the world, ask questions and tell people what I found.
Welcome to The Correspondent.