Ryan Grim

Grim's record is measured in stories rather than statuettes. He ran the Washington bureaus of two national outlets, HuffPost and The Intercept, and then left the second one to build a newsroom from scratch, which is a rarer move than it sounds. Three books on American politics and the drug war came out of that reporting, and the 2024 launch of Drop Site News with Jeremy Scahill put him at the center of an independent-media wave that the Associated Press and the Times of Israel both treated as a force in Democratic primaries by 2026. A seat on the National Press Club board rounds out a career built on sources and vote counts.