Washington Star reborn as NOTUS expands into local news and sports

Washington’s old Star name is back twice over, and both revivals are aimed at the same opening: readers left shortchanged after The Washington Post cut more than 300 journalists in February.

The layoffs hit nearly every department, with especially deep losses in sports, metro, books, local coverage and international reporting. Staff members and supporters protested outside the paper’s downtown Washington headquarters, a public sign of how sharply the cuts landed in a city that has long relied on the Post to track the region’s political power and neighborhood life. Post leadership had already been under pressure after the paper dropped a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race, and management said the newsroom was being narrowed to areas of authority, distinctiveness and impact.

Into that gap steps NOTUS, the Washington political news site created in 2023 with a $20 million grant from Robert Allbritton through the Allbritton Journalism Institute. The outlet said in April that it would rebrand as The Star and relaunch in the first week of June, with plans to grow from about 45 staffers to roughly 95 by the end of 2026. Tim Grieve, the editor in chief, said the new operation wants to cover both political Washington and local Washington, a direct challenge to the sense that the city’s everyday beats have been thinned out.

The expansion is not just symbolic. The newsroom has already hired several former Washington Post reporters, and the addition of local news and sports is meant to answer a concrete reader need: who is covering school boards, neighborhood disputes, city services, and the teams that knit the D.C. area together when the dominant daily pulls back? The pitch is straightforward. If Washington’s accountability coverage has become thinner, The Star is trying to become the place that catches what gets missed.

A separate Washington Star is also being revived under media executive Dovid Efune, the publisher of The New York Sun. That version, which began publishing on Substack, has a more conservative tilt and a faster timeline for expansion. Efune said he wants a website live within two months and a weekend print newspaper by the end of 2026, and he plans to hire up to 50 full-time journalists and contributors.

The overlap gives the name fresh force. The original Washington Star, founded in 1852, was long considered the capital’s paper of record, won Pulitzers for editorial writing in 1979 and criticism in 1981, and closed on August 7, 1981, after 128 years. Robert Allbritton’s father, Joe Allbritton, once owned it. For a city that has lost newsroom capacity, the return of the Star name is less a nostalgic gesture than a race to see who can rebuild trust, and do the reporting, first.