Behind Darren Samuelsohn on our call sat a plastic tub. Then another one. Inside are about 200 journals, decades of a reporter writing to himself, and he’s working his way through every one of them.

Darren and I go back years. Energy, then politics. He was the reporter and I was the flack, and we’ve both changed our shade a few times since.

In late 2022, one of those journal entries saved him. His team at Insider had just won an SPJ award for Conflicted Congress, its investigation into members trading stocks. Washington is still arguing about that story. Then he was fired. He told me it sucked. He also told me it was the most he’d ever talked about it.

So he wrote. An essay called “Why I Love Journalism,” trying to talk himself into staying in the business. Somewhere along the way it flipped into a letter from journalism back to him.

Love, Journalism. Comma in the middle.

That’s his Substack now. He didn’t leave the newsroom right away. He went back in twice, to The Messenger and then USA Today, where he led White House, Congress and campaign coverage through the stretch all of us lived through. Earlier this year he walked out. His tank was empty, and had been for a lot longer than he let himself admit.

He’s clear-eyed about the business he came back to. The outlets that are thriving, from a one-man courts beat on Substack to the Times and the Post, know exactly who they’re talking to. He worries about where that leads, with everyone gravitating to their own churches. He also sees a living in it for journalists willing to experiment and fail. He’s failed before. He learned from every one.

What struck me is how much fun he’s having. A weekly podcast. Photographs of power lines out his car window. Poetry. A Bigfoot story he swears is coming. At 12, Darren wanted to be Dave Barry. Now he has the column, and Dave Barry is on Substack too.

I asked how he knows when it’s time to go. His grandfather admired people who talked about ideas, he said. So Darren checks whether he’s still learning something about himself, the world or the business he loves. At Insider and again at USA Today, the answer stopped being yes.

He says a lot of what he writes now is for the reporters he used to edit. A little inspiration. A nudge along the way.

Consider this one passed along.

Notable Quotes

“And then I got fired. And man, I’ll just say it. It sucked.” — Darren Samuelsohn

“I think the tank was empty two or three years before it was empty.” — Darren Samuelsohn

“Everyone’s kind of gravitating to their own churches, and that’s dangerous as well as a bounty and an opportunity for journalists who want to write.” — Darren Samuelsohn

Takeaway

Sometimes the love letter to the work only gets written after the work lets you go.

The full write-up of this conversation lives on my website: The Vibes Can Tell You a Lot: What the Ground Game Sees

In 2004, Jon Seaton went door to door for Bush-Cheney with a clipboard. Can the president count on your support? Great. I can get you a yard sign. There were never enough yard signs. Somewhere in Arlington there are probably still boxes of those sheets, every answer written in pen.

Jon and I came up together in Bush world — him in the field, me on the communications side. He went on to run John McCain’s national field program, advise Lindsey Graham and launch Echo Canyon Consulting, named Best New Firm at this year’s Reed Awards. This week he came on The Friday Reporter to compare notes, four weeks out from the midterms.

The clipboard is gone. It all happens on a phone now, and a campaign knows more about a voter before the knock than we used to learn after it. Jon gives Karl Rove the credit. Rove decided grassroots could be measured like money raised or quotes in the paper: doors knocked, voters reached, events attended, every single day. That idea built the modern campaign. It also built every corporate and issue campaign in Washington that actually works.

So you’d expect a guy who sells canvassing data to swear by the numbers.

He doesn’t, entirely. Jon isn’t anti-analytics, but politics is a people business, and no forecaster can stand in 50 congressional districts at once. He reads Google Trends. He watches the national environment. Then he gets out to Phoenix or Texas, sits down at a restaurant and talks to whoever is next to him. Everybody jokes about the vibes, he told me. The vibes can tell you a lot.

What he hears out there isn’t what Washington is chasing. Not one person in Phoenix has brought up the White House ballroom with him. They want to afford groceries and gas. The campaigns that miss it are the ones that are entirely too online, chasing the outrage of the day because it feels like catnip. His fix is almost too simple. Take Twitter off your phone and listen.

I’ve worked the last four weeks of a race the same way for years. I don’t listen to Washington. I call my friends outside the Beltway.

On Election Day, Jon sends one tweet: What are you hearing? Then he waits like the rest of us, with the whole thing finally in the voters’ hands.

Notable Quotes

“They joke about the vibes, but the vibes can tell you a lot.” — Jon Seaton

“I don’t know one person in Phoenix, Arizona that cares about what the Kennedy Center is called.” — Jon Seaton

“You can question their judgment. You shouldn’t question their motives.” — Jon Seaton, on what he learned from John McCain

Takeaway

The data tells a campaign which door to knock on. The person who answers tells it what’s actually going on. Four weeks out, Jon Seaton is still listening for both.

For 25 years I wrote words that weren’t my own. At the Department of Commerce, in the Speaker’s office, at the RNC, for elected officials and whoever else I worked for. That’s the job. The best communicators are the ones you never see.

Alethia Jackson calls it being the whisperer. When she invited me onto The Power Within, her podcast about power, influence and modern leadership, I got to be the one answering the questions for a change. This week The Friday Reporter is sharing that conversation.

Alethia founded The Ultimate Power Play, a community of women leaders across health care, finance, technology, government and culture. She opens every interview the same way: how do you define power? Where I landed is that power is the ability to move something. A person, a decision, a conversation. Not the biggest title or the longest résumé. The ability to read a room and then act on what you see.

I believe the quietest person in the room is often the most powerful one, and I spent most of my career being that person on purpose. Noise gets clicks. The people who sit back and take stock are the ones who actually move things.

But staying quiet for a client is strategy. Staying quiet about your own point of view is something else. At 53 I finally have enough confidence (and enough gray hair) to share mine. When you’ve spent a career advancing other people’s voices, finding room for your own feels almost uncomfortable.

Alethia knows the feeling. Early in her career she would sit in meetings and hold back a point, figuring someone else would make it. A mentor told her that what she was thinking had value. She was in that room to take up time and space.

Someone else will say it, sure. Nobody else will say it from your experience. Imposter syndrome might be the most overused phrase of 2026, and there’s a reason it’s everywhere.

Since I started Authentically Speaking, colleagues have told me it gave them the courage to share their own points of view. That’s the part that keeps me writing.

We closed on legacy. Lately I’ve been running elevator pitch trainings, teaching everyone from the front desk to the C-suite to say who they are, what they do and why it matters in the ride from the first floor to the third. It seems small. It’s the same lesson I had to learn myself.

On the way out, Alethia said people who help others communicate give them power and voice. I spent 25 years giving mine away. It turns out you’re allowed to keep some.

Listen to my conversation with Alethia Jackson on this week’s Friday Reporter: [EPISODE LINK]. Find The Power Within wherever you get your podcasts and The Ultimate Power Play at powerplayseries.org.

Pull Quotes

“I spent 25 years writing the words that were not my own… I now feel like I have enough confidence and enough gray hair to share my own unique point of view.” — Lisa Camooso Miller

“I’m there to take time and space and to have that voice.” — Alethia Jackson

“People who help others communicate give them power and they give them voice.” — Alethia Jackson

Takeaway

Spend a career giving other people their voice and you earn the right to use your own.