• by Ray Schultz , January 29, 2024

The Washington Post has hired Patrick Svitek, a reporter who has covered politics in Texas for The Texas Tribune, as a national politics breaking news reporter.

Svitek joins the Post team as it gears up to cover the 2024 presidential campaign, the White House, Congress and national politics.  

Starting at The Tribune in 2015, Svitek reported on the presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Rick Perry in 2016 and Julián Castro and Beto O’Rourke in 2020, the Post says. He resides in San Antonio.  

Svitek interned in the Post newsroom in 2014, during his senior year at Northwestern University as part of the Medill School of Journalism’s residency program. He helped cover local and regional news, including politics, the Post continues. 

The move comes as both the Post and The Tribune have experienced layoffs in recent months. The Tribune staff announced last Wednesday that it is forming a union.  

In other Post news, new CEO Will Lewis told Semaphor that journalism needs a new paywall/subscription model. 

"If you want to attract people that don’t have a propensity to take that kind of monthly subscription, which is most young adult Americans, it’s going to be on the news industry to design a new way of allowing them to access our journalism,” Smith said, according to Semaphor. 

He continued, “There’s very positive evidence of how news can be accessed and paid for in more innovative ways. There are day passes that are successful, there’s week passes, there are models like the Guardian where you can make donations. So there’s a whole new generation of paying user concepts. I’m pretty excited about it. I think it’s newsroom 3.0.” 

At the same time, he acknowledged that “the existing model is creaking.”