It’s been almost exactly a year since Andrew Beaujon launched his daily news roundup, “Washingtonian Today.” At the time, he was sensing a shift in the public’s relationship to current events, a pervasive fatigue that was deepening with the approach of the second inauguration of Donald Trump. “Washingtonian Today” was an answer to that: a daily digest of the stories that are most relevant to life in DC, meant—in part—to liberate readers from the need to spend their days scrolling social media and refreshing newspaper homepages. On Friday, I called Beaujon up to ask about what the past year has been like and how he thinks Americans should be processing current events.
I want to ask about your news habits. When you’re compiling the newsletter, where are you getting your news?
I get up every morning at five, grab my laptop, and take a look at what the big newspapers and news sites have on their front pages. Then there’s a site that I look at called “Memeorandom.” It tracks what a bunch of high-powered social media users are sharing. I also read some newsletters—Playbook, Punchbowl AM, Post Local, and Axios DC—mainly to make sure I haven’t missed anything.
I don’t look at much of anything the night before, because I feel quite strongly that there could be something that happens at 3 AM that throws everything into complete chaos. Maybe I’m a moron for doing it this way, but I feel like it’s not really until the next morning that you can say, “Okay, here’s what’s happened, and here’s what people are probably going to be thinking about.”
You didn’t mention social media. Do you avoid checking it directly?
I used to get a lot of news from Twitter, but I realized it had become useless when the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore got destroyed by that ship. I immediately went to Twitter to try to find on-the-ground accounts of what was going on, but it was just all this conspiracy bullshit, because it was only surfacing people who pay for Twitter. So I decided to get off of there, because I just didn’t think it was worthwhile for news anymore.
I’m on Bluesky now, which kind of fills that need, but not anything like Twitter used to. I look at Instagram just for local stuff—like, Washingtonian Problems is a really good way of figuring out what people are thinking about here. But that’s pretty much it.
Some armchair math would suggest that you might be reading the news for at least 15 hours per week.
Yeah, that’s probably about right.
How does that feel?
Terrible. It feels terrible. There’s nothing fun about the news anymore.
What is the darkest story that you’ve encountered this year?
I’m not sure I could—let me ask you, what do you think the darkest story is?
I have no idea. There are so many.
I mean, there are days that just seem so dark. Like, you texted me the other day about what a dark roundup it was.
Right. What happened that day? I don’t remember.
That’s the other weird thing about this. I almost feel like I have amnesia every day. I wake up every morning and confront a world that has somehow gotten remarkably worse overnight.
For me personally, I think one of the worst things was the Kennedy Center. And I know how effete that sounds, but it’s been a part of my life since I was a little kid. It had never been in any danger, and now suddenly it’s been turned into this culture war arts complex, completely unnecessarily. When Trump first took it over, and then when he slapped his name on it—obviously many, many worse things are happening—but that one really hit home for me, because it reflects this philosophy of he wants to be involved in every aspect of life.
Traditionally, DC has avoided the consequences [of federal politics], and it wasn’t really until Trump’s first administration—with Comet Ping Pong and Seth Rich—that all of the insanity that was happening online started to manifest in real life and come here, which kind of culminated in January 6. I didn’t think about how much worse it was going to get for us this time around. I mean, taking over the local police force—oh, god, that was a really dark moment. I somehow blocked that one out.
It’s interesting that you and I are both having trouble recalling a lot of the dark stuff that’s happened in the last year.
They’ve learned how to dominate the conversation.
Yeah, and to not leave any space for reflection.
Right, exactly. And there’s an upside to that, which is that attention drifts. Like, nobody’s talking about the Gulf of America anymore. But the downside is we’re all just kind of walking around in this fog of news flying at us all the time. I think it’s really important to be able to protect yourself from it.
How do you protect yourself?
I try not to look at anything after dinner. I don’t go on social media at all. I think you can really lose the sense of who you are and what’s actually important to you when you’re so focused on all this stuff that you have zero control over.
What stories do you think were under-covered this year?
I felt like the shutdown was the biggest local story of the year. But the coverage was very political, like, “Who’s winning on the messaging and what’s the legislation?” That is, of course, very important. But I don’t think it’s so important to people who are outside of the political world. Shutdowns are devastating to the local economy, and I know if I were a federal worker and unexpectedly out of work, I’d be waking up super early and trying to figure out what the hell is going to happen. So that was a time for me to be, like, the hometown guy and try to collect everything I could about that.
Which news outlets have been doing a particularly good job covering Trump?
I’m gonna give a plug to my hometown paper, the Washington Post, which—as despicable as its editorial section has become under the craven gazillionaire who owns it—I think its news department has been knocking it out of the park. To me, it’s a model of how you can get through this: You keep your head down, you do what is important to you, and you just try to keep going. And I think that’s all any of us can do.
What advice do you have for people trying to consume news?
Don’t do it too much. Just be focused. Be disciplined about when you look at it. Take stuff off your phone. Stay off social media unless you really need to go on. Don’t get alerts. Draw lines around it. Remember: these people want you beaten down. They want you alarmed. They want you posting on social media all the time. Remember that your actual life, your family, is way more important than any of this stuff. Your dismay about all of this can really drag you down. Go for walks and be active in your community. Do things that are important to you, because that’s the only way we’re gonna get through this.
