With Local News International, Dave Jorgenson becomes his own TikTok guy

On July 22, Dave Jorgenson, also known as “The Washington Post TikTok guy,” posted a video to his social channels.

“Dear Jeff Bezos,” it began, “If you’re reading this, you already know. I’m leaving the Washington Post and starting my own company.” And, he went on to explain, he wouldn’t be doing it alone: His boss Lauren Saks, who’d been deputy director of video at the Post, and her boss Micah Gelman, who’d been director of video at the Post, would be coming with him.

The new company is called Local News International, or LNI, and it cracked nearly 100,000 YouTube subscribers on its very first day. Its first newsletter, sent on July 24, revealed the return of another familiar name for people who followed Jorgenson’s work at the Post: Chris Vazquez, who had started working with Jorgenson in the summer of 2021, when he was a Post intern. Jorgenson also hired Sarah Hashemi, who was a video graphics producer at the Post, to make graphics for LNI; both Vazquez and Hashemi are currently part-time (Vazquez writes one of two weekly newsletters), and the company’s about page also lists Jorgenson’s dog, Lola, a five-year-old Boxer-Labrador mix, as a cofounder. The company is for-profit; a section of the website is dedicated to media strategy consulting, which Gelman and Saks are overseeing.

I talked to Jorgenson over Zoom about the origin story of LNI, his vision for the company, and using humor to break through to an audience exhausted by the news. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So I launched my own channel at the Post and what happened right away, which we probably could have guessed, is I was basically doing two jobs. I was trying to run the Washington Post Universe channel and also this other LNI channel. And that was longform, which meant sometimes three or four or five times as much work, because it would be a 10-minute video versus, like, 45 seconds.

That was a lot. But also, I don’t think there’s a clear vision at the Post, even now. If they said, “We’re doing this, we’re doing that,” it would be more helpful than what they do right now, which is more like, “We might do this or we might try that.” There’s this kind of uneven shift all the time.

Lauren and I had a much more frank conversation around May, where she said, “If you’re thinking about going independent, let me know.” And I went “Let you know?” The dynamic was funny because she was my manager and editor. I was glad she brought it up, because I was never going to be the one to bring it up to her. Around that time Micah [took a buyout], and a week later she told me Micah might be interested too. So that all happened pretty organically, and that was before the Post offered me a buyout.